Existence of the soul

I'm not proposing additional superfluous entities. I'm trying to refine our understanding of the relationships among things we already know to exist: mind, matter, and reality. That is, unless you deny that your mind exists, which I think we covered before in discussing Descartes discovery of ontological foundation. The last (non-parenthetical) sentence is beyond the scope of my argument. I'm not arguing that everyone must be assumed to have abilities until those abilities are tested and falsified. I am simply arguing that the conclusion that certain abilities cease when our ability to measure them does is unreasonable. Quite not. Our private thoughts are all we can know we know. We can postulate a priori that a material world exists, and that our thoughts are necessarily material, however there is no objective basis for this postulation. Indeed, the existence of an objective world requires this a priori postulation since solipsism cannot be falsified. Not at all, since I'm talking about minds, and our own mind is in fact fundamentally all that we can know with certainty. I don't disagree that from a materialistic position one cannot account for mental phenomena, my only goal has been to illustrate that these phenomena do exist, and that therefore ontological materialism is false.Blessings,::

True, however I think that the three independant tests provide sufficient verification of brain death. The absence of auditory evoked potentials indicate the brain is not responding to stimuli at all, i.e. it's no longer registering or processing any preceptual information from the physical world. Couple that with flat EEG and documented absence of blood flow for 60 minutes, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find life signs amongst those death-signs. Another -- the preconceived notions are stored in their minds. I fail to see the distinction, but I would be happy to answer if you would explain. I'm not saying that the mind itself is affected -- only its interaction with the material world. If the mind were ontologically primary, then the brain would simply be a manefestation of the mind -- the observable portion of it which appears as a result of its interaction with matter. I don't know, yet. Some regard it so, but I think strong arguments exist which elevate it beyond fantasy.Blessings,::

You keep saying this as if the more you assert it the truer it will become. I've rebutted the assertion, and you've dismissed the rebuttals out of hand. Why don't you directly address them? I've supplied plenty of argumentation which you have yet to address directly. The issue at hand is intimately linked to the Hard Problem as set forth by Chalmers et al, and other than mentioning Chalmers so as to dismiss him, you've not even shown you have the even slightest understanding of what the Problem is! The most you've done is link to three articles which draw conclusions based on the arbitrary preuspposition of ontological materialism to which you yourself adhere, and thereby blatantly beg the question. Your only reponses to my rebuttals have been to deny that they rebut anything (which only supports my suspicion that you don't actually understand the material I present) and categorically reject them because they conflict with your arbitrary ontological allegiance. This assertion is patently false and can be easily shown so with reference to my repeated argumentation from Chalmers and the problem of measurement and the irrelevancy of Chalmers' arguments to the additional argumentation of mine which you summarized here. It neither contradicts my position, and likewise the necessity of replacement supports it. That's my ultimate point: Your decision to accept one explanation over the other is based on an arbitrary presupposition which may in fact be false according to some rather robust arguments from the likes of Chalmers, Gdel, Penrose, etc... 1.) What misrepresentation?
2.) Rebuttals which you do not understand are not "evasions."
3.) Even if your accusations were true, why would that justify your hostility?Blessings,::

It appears I've been misinterpreted, which I understand because I have not been explicit regarding my particular stance on the issue since my primary focus has been simlpy the refutation of ontological materialism sans alternatives. Personally, I don't hold to a dualistic view but instead regard the likely alternative to be a type of panpsychic idealsim wherein the material world is simply a subset of the phenomenal world which arises intersubjectively out of the common intersection of every individual consciousness's own reality.Let the arguments from personal incredulity commence... IMHO, your question is based on a falsely dualistic premise. As if I haven't said it enough... empricism assumes objectivism, it assumes materialism, it a priori denies subjective experience. To then claim that subjective experience doesn't exist because it cannot be empirically verified is blatant question begging. Because currently your evidential standards require objectivity. No wonder they are insufficient to assail subjective experience. Insisting on an objective test to verify properties of subjective experience is absurd.Blessings,::

A note to all...First, thank you all for this engaging dialogue.Second, as is obvious, I'm now myself contending with five individual respondents, and it is beginning to wear me thin. Please forgive me if it takes me longer than usual to respond to any subsequent replies you decide to offer me.Third, I'm beginning to suspect that we're all approaching a stalemate. If I don't feel that the dialogue has made any real progress in a few more rounds of replies, I will simply desist, and I will post a note at that time announcing my desistance.Thanks again, everyone.Blessings,::

(I'll try and keep my points short to ease the burden.)To quibble: Actually, your mind is all you can know with certainty, and my mind is all I can know. But neither of us can be the least certain about the other's mind.On the other hand, objective material reality is the thing that the both of us can be as equally certain about. Ergo it makes sense to me to base conclusions on the presence of an objective material reality.I guess my point is, we can develop a consensus about matter. We can't do that about our individual minds. Therefore there's no reason to assume the ontological supremacy of mind, and quite a number of reasons not to do so, the greatest of which being that the simpler materialist model explains matter and minds through entities we can all agree exist.

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You seem to assume that the mind emerges as a consequence of neural activity, which is precisely the assumption that I'm challenging, and precisely the assumption that may be shown plainly false by things like the existence of subjective experience, phenomenal facts, and/or even the problem of solipsism.

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The existence of subjective experience is hardly evidence of a non-physical basis for the mind! Indeed, every subjective experience we have a report of has been associated with a physical brain....unless you have evidence of a subjective experience not associated with a brain.If so, please provide.

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The issue at hand is the relation of mind to matter, so basically there is no difference between the relation of the mind to the brain or the mind to the leg since the latter in both instances fall under the category "matter".

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Um, no, sorry.All the observations science has made of behavior point towards the mind as a product of the brain.People who receive damage to the right parietal lobe lose awareness of their surroundings on their left side. There is no damage to their eyes, hearing, etc. They become unconscious of that which is on their left.Why would a non-physical mind have this problem?People who receive damage to certain portions of the visual cortex of the brain are no longer able to recognize faces. They can still see as perfectly as before the damage; their brains, however, are no longer capable of recognizing faces. Even if they look at themselves in a mirror, they have no conscious recognition of who's face it is.Why would a non-physical mind have this problem?Hallucinations (changes in conscious experience) which are induced by LSD are caused by the action of the chemical on the brain.The changes in states of consciousness associated with sleep and dreaming occur in the context of certain brain states.These are changes in conscious experience (subjective experience} which are brought on by chemical or physical changes in the brain.

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he point is that materialism cannot account for specific mental facts such as phenomenal experience, qualia, etc. At most you can invoke the "materialism-of-the-gaps" claim and insist that the workings of the brain are simply too complex to comprehensively catalogue brain states such as to exhaust the infinitely diverse spectrum of subjective experience but you "know" that it must be possible anyway.

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No, not at all.YOU are the one making the positive claim without any positive evidence.There is a great deal of evidence which points to a physical basis of mind. You simply point to any gap in our knowledge and try to claim that as evidence to support the notion of a non-physically produced mind. I've asked you repeatedly for evidence of mind which isn't a product of the brain. There might be some we have not discovered yet, but so far it pretty much appears as though, "You stick a icepick in Johhny's brain and he starts acting funny."You're making precisely the same logical error as Intelligent Design folks, who when asked for positive evidence of ID point to some complex structure and say "Evolution couldn't do that".Just because we do not have perfect knowledge does not mean that we cannot or should not draw inferences from the knowledge we do have.Just because you are incredulous about how the brain could account for subjective experience doesn't mean you have to resort to magical or supernatural thinking.

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As if, given enough information about an individual's brain state, we could discern precisely what he is thinking. The problem with that is still subjective experience: significance, meaning, value, qualia... these things are individually unique and cannot be singularly associated with a particular brain state. That is the core of the argument which aims to falsify ontological materialism. Qualia are real facts which cannot be explained in material terms.

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Your only alternative to that is to deny that subjective experience exists thus denying that qualia exist and are real facts. If that is your position I have to wonder what motivated you to respond to this post in the first place.

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All of this is just arguments on how to account for subjective experience. I make no particular claims on that matter. I do question what your positive evidence is for a supernatural "mind" that does not depend upon the physical.------------------
"Evolution is a 'theory', just like gravity. If you don't like it, go jump off a bridge."

"It appears I've been misinterpreted, ..."It would take me a great deal of effort to determine if your alternative actually substantively differs from either the standard dualistic view or the monistic view, and I'll freely admit I'm not, at this moment, willing to exert that effort. So sue me!"To then claim that subjective experience doesn't exist because it cannot be empirically verified "Oh god no, I don't believe anyone here is denying subjective experience. "I think, therefore I am" and all that. Yes, I have subjective experience, and through my appraisal of objective evidence I conclude that others share this experience."Because currently your evidential standards require objectivity. No wonder they are insufficient to assail subjective experience."What is evidence that is non-objective? Is non-objective evidence useful to discuss? Is it even a coherent concept?"insisting on an objective test to verify properties of subjective experience is absurd."There are at least 2 ways to approach this.
1. I do that all the time. I'm a psychologist. You might think I'm not "really" studying "really" subjective things. Psychologists can invent new illusions based on knowledge of the brain's visual processing - that is, predict people's subjective experience of an illusion. If that's not subjective "enough", then let me move on to the second way to answer that...2. Then is what you're discussing capable of being discussed in a productive manner? Certainly, if you're saying objective evidence isn't good enough, then you have completely removed yourself from Science. Fine. Agreed?Then I just want to know what possible consequences there are to your viewpoint? Why should anyone care? What does this do for us to say that minds exist independent of physical brains?

In case anyone missed it, the productive phase of this discussion ended in message 53. I'll post the important bit:crashfrog writes:

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As for walking, you're saying that it takes the unique capabilities of both brains and legs to walk. But what you're implying is a third thing - that if you had legs that could not walk, and a brain that could not tell legs to walk, there would be a third, untestable entity that still possessed the ability to walk. But how do you know that's the case?

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:: writes:

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I'm not certain that it is entirely untestable in principle, though at present we are unable to test it. We return again to Chalmer's Hard Problem - to which I know of no easy solution except to invert our entire ontological paradigm to one of idealism or panpsychism.

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Crash nailed it. Dipthong's reply is, to me, throwing in the towel. Crash's point is pretty elegant. Dipthong saying "I don't know unless we totally find a new way to think about everything" is a response, of sorts, but it's at this point that these discussions stop having any real consequence.

If you want to provide a REAL rebuttal you need to discuss the effects of severing the corpus callosum and explain how it is that they are NOT effects on the operation of the mind. You haven't even explained why the supposedly disembodied minds from OBE's somehow do not seem to have any use for the corpus callosum while embodied minds clearly do.You have not done that. So your claim to have provided rebuttals is false.Instead you for some strange reason assume that I am asserting that the the ability to communicate GIVEN a channel like the corpus callosum is lost. Not only have I not said that - but in fact I have explicitly pointed out that the need for such a channel for the mind to function normally is evidence FOR my view. And it is despite your suggestion to the contrary - saying that a replacement is needed confirms that the mind IS dependant on the physical corpus callosum for communication between the hemispheres - the very point you are attempting to deny.Mreover you have made numerous unfounded and unsupported assumptions about my presuppositions in examining the evidence - which could only be relevant if we were to actually DISCUSS the evidence which you clearly refuse to do. These are ALL evasions.So this explains why I "ignore" your rebuttals. There aren't any to ignore. I can't dismiss something out of hand if it doesn't exist.I can hardly fail to understand something that isn't there.And yes you really do evade the issues rather than make actual rebuttals. You NEVER discuss the actual evidence any further than vague assertions like your suggestion that SOME aspect is disputed - without even saying what is disputed.So yes, I think the level of hostility in my posts repesents an entirely understandable frustration with your evasions and dishonesty.

Perhaps you would like to define the terms: solipsism and qualia, and explain how they might be considered "facts." These words are not included in my old Thordike Barnhart.Much of my "subjective experience" may be attributed to a natural injection of hormones - triggered by the brain in response to internal and/or external stimuli. Thus, thrills, chills, tingles and spooky feelings are a reading of bodily state, i.e. a physical reality in which the brain acts as both initiator and detector. Such "subjective experiences" may also accompany certain diseases of the central nervous system including, especially, brain tumors. Significance, meaning, and value may be associated with particular brain states known as: Education, Training, and Prejudice. So, What's a Qualia?db

I agree. And I do not hear anyone contesting that. a) One can account for many mental phenomena from a materialistic position.
b) The fact that questions remain unanswered does not constitute falsification. db writes - ... "brain death." The expression is somewhat misleading. My point exactly. No signs of life detected by current technology. But even so, true death has not occurred. "Clinical Death" is not Real Death but may become real death if the procedure falls short of success.db writes - A thought - The preconceived notions are stored in their brains. That's what the debate is about isn't it? Big IF. Please share those arguments here. Even so, you cite objective tests in support of your hypothesis claiming the lack of objective evidence as confirmation of your assumptions. This seems illogical to me.db[This message has been edited by doctrbill, 08-27-2003]

This has been enjoyable. Don't rush off. Perhaps you can zero in on one point at a time; respond only to those questions and challenges which you believe central to the issue? (I wonder if I could do that). There are plenty of interesting things to debate on this forum. Take a break, if you must, but don't just disappear.db------------------
http://www.sun-day-school.us

I am new to this post so forgive me if this has already been dealt with but has anyone made a point of explaining how a mind/soul is able to affect and or direct the physical structure of the brain? This would be a great phenomena which could be measured and documented and be evidence of an actual distinction between the two!

Funny you should ask.Many here have been requesting such an explanation but none has been forthcoming. Indeed! But is seems that, according to proponents, the mind is non-physical and therefore cannot be measured (or something to that effect). The problem with proponents so far is that they seem to lack awareness of what has already been learned of the brain/mind. Some of the phenomena cited are readily explained from well established neurology and psychology. The result has not been very instructive for those who are aware of these things.Have you an hypothesis?db------------------
http://www.sun-day-school.us