Re: Ideas are Material

materiality of ideas, and the ideal processes of matter.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• philosophy
• relativistic
• skepticism
• being
• and
• becoming
• existence

[JohnHasSeriousQ]

My friend Lucile told me that there is nothing INVISIBLE that makes up mental phenomena, and since she is always right, I KNOW that there is nothing invisible about my mind! In other words: you claiming that there is something invisible that makes up, at least in part, what the mind is, seems to be an opinion based on your faith! How do you know that there is something invisible that makes up, at least in part, mental phenomena?

The mind IS the brain!

If not, then what is it !?

[0ThouArtThat0]

It's very simple, John. If I were standing before you, you would not be able to see my thoughts. You could study and measure my brain as much as you'd like, but there are no thoughts there. The thoughts are within my experience. They are certainly related to what goes on in my brain, but they cannot be reduced to it.

[JohnHasSeriousQ]

True; sort of!

Reductionism could not explain the mind anymore than listing all the parts of a bicycle could explain bike riding. Fair enough!

However, Mary, (a color blind scientist who studies light) cannot see red, not because red is invisible, rather it is that she has some physical (material) brain-state that prevents HER from the experience of seeing red. There is nothing magical or invisible that prevents Mary from seeing red, she merely has a boo-boo in her occipital lobe.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I'd argue for what's called an ecological theory of color. Color isn't simply subjective, produced by our individual brain wiring and eye structure. Nor is it simply objective, caused by the wavelength of light (there is NO causal relationship between wavelength and perception of color). The truth seems to be that color emerges when various sorts of nervous systems interact with various sorts of environments.

[prhughes0]

Why not, for g-d's sake?

Of course the program-functioning (thought, etc.) and the processor-hardware (brain-function, body-function and body-condition) are strongly related, in our case.

The future IS in that skull right now (and nowhere else, unless you shared it.)

Indeed, human brains have a strong ability to imagine: that IS the future.

Outside the JellyNetworks, (including all animals) i see no structure capable of such mental feats as projecting a future, and no need for it.

Do you?

[0ThouArtThat0]

prhughes, time is not in the skull. Mind is not localizable in space--it is that which allows space and time to exist at all. Your eyes open your being to the world itself, and your experience is always directed toward the world with others. Don't trap yourself in your skull; that's not where we live.

[Barklord]

I'm sick of people adopting an apologetic tone for a magical worldview.

[adjohnson916]

I think all this mumbo-jumbo is just the new age equivalent of the tired religious claims of the supernatural acting on the physical world. And I think either you have innocently inherited that mindset outside of your control, or you subconsciously deceive yourself into believing such things must exist in an act of psychological self-comfort.

[DrDeist]

Hey, OThou.. - you pretty smart kid. You gotta maybe PhD or gonna get one?

[Israe5l]

Maybe it might turn out that, there are objective aspects to the "I" apart from the obvious subjective aspects.

[Israe5l]

I just think a philosopher cannot say a whole lot about the brain. If we mix up subjects and objects, we are entering empirical science (physics). I feel it is important that a philosopher should draw a line between what he does and empirical science. A philosopher should get his source of ideas from his life and fellow philosophers. No matter how you do it a philosopher's authority cames from the "I".

[prhughes0]

A world full of bacteria (and whatever they eat) is an open invitation to get bigger and swallow bacteria whole (as well as to get smaller and eat them from inside). Both options have been thoroughly explored. The "smaller" path limit is virus-sized, while gravity and metabolic needs restrict the (bodily) "bigger" way. TechCiv, like social insect colonies, is a way of getting bigger despite gravity and food scarcity, up to a point. "We" are approaching that point now, inviting new forms of life.

[prhughes0]

0TAT0: Meteors headed toward earth might be diverted by a Technical Civilization a bit more capable than ours. If you see TechCiv as an intelligent life form, i agree.

This "single stream" of yours strikes me as pure anthropocentric narcissism. Crown of Creation-ism.

"We" still ARE jellyfish, as well as bacteria and a vast array of other living systems. Food gets mighty scarce in a world full of jellyfish, until something finds a way to eat jellyfish, and then to eat jellyfish eaters, and so on.

[prhughes0]

Clearly, without human brains, no human minds.

The activities we call "mind", like the activities we call "data processing", while utterly dependent upon hardware (jelly or silicon), are not identical with the hardware, any more than swimming is identical with the swimmer.

If i ever really understand what you mean, i might comment it more appropriately.

Even though i won the junior high spelling contest in 8th grade, the automated spell-checker now knows better than i do how to spell.

Regards

p

[prhughes0]

Before teletype machines, only a human operator could convert text into electrical (telegraph) signals for long distance transmission. Now your computer performs this conversion and its reverse (signals to text). Before computers, only human beings could read (and understand) text. These machines are outside our brain(s), although products thereof.

Just what you really mean is still unclear to me. If you mean the ability to "consciously" experience, i suspect that many animals share that.

Ciao

p

[1PostPoMoMaN1]

Some angry and depressed soul is putting minuses again to me.

[JohnHasSeriousQ]

I am not saying that minds of other sorts do not or could not exist. I am saying that our minds ARE OUR brains! There does not seem to be something //invisible// about OUR minds: in humans, brains are necessary to have minds. We have minds BECAUSE we have brains that work, in the same way that tables (those with the ability) have minds BECAUSE of what ever it MUST be for tables (if they could) to have any mental phenomena at all (if they do)! And no, tables probably dont think!

[JohnHasSeriousQ]

I was not talking about generally minds, minds that are more or less advance than ours, or any other minds except human minds.

I think you knew that I mean that WE associate with having (human) minds!

For clarity: There does not seem to be anything outside of our brain that does ANY of the mental phenomena WORK that we associate with having OUR HUMAN minds.