Posted on 04/21/2016 12:30:08 PM PDT by Heartlander
What, people don’t have those?
I feel like I have them all the time!
Brain farts?
Well, maybe it’s because abstract thoughts, and more generally the “mind”, aren’t the product of a single specific area of the brain. If abstract thought and consciousness are the product of an amalgamation of several areas of the brain working in concert, you’d have to have some kind of distributed seizure in order to provoke involuntary complex or abstract cogitation. On further consideration, involuntary abstract thought sounds a lot like having a dream. Is our sleep really just a massive, hours-long full-brain seizure?
Mind exists apart from the brain. Buddhism 101.
Higher consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural network, not the function of any one mechanism.
The brain is just a collection of cells...just like the heart,lungs,liver,kidneys,etc.A chemical/physiological abnormality can cause profound alterations in thinking and perception.
Ping to an extension of the brief conversation we had yesterday - my apologies, I had to break it off before it got to the interesting bits.
Lol, yes!
the falsity of materialism is why secular humanism with its denial of consciousness is a bad premise to base the foundation of libtardism on.
and then have trouble getting started?
I do.
You are a spirit. You live in a body. The brain is the interface unit.
to put it in computer terms ....his mapping of the brain told him that brain handled the io and handle the memory but it didn’t deal with the actual CPU function
abstract thought could be just an aberration to begin with and makes no difference in the procreation of the species.
There are enough undefined terms in that sentence to make HAL start slamming doors on astronauts.
Truth.
And yet, the statement still has meaningful semantic content.
Call it a metametaphor.
My problem with it is that through implication it suggests that consciousness is actually created by emergence. More properly, we can only say that a sufficiently complex system enables the emergence of measurable, or even detectable, consciousness. A rock, for example, could be fully conscious. But how would we know? It has no known mechanism to express that consciousness.
The definition of consciousness is a slippery one, for sure. Maybe on some extremely rudimentary level, even a single atom has consciousness, or even its component parts.
Given simple physical instances of electrical charge like electrons and protons, atoms are composed which have properties no electron nor proton has. From where do these atomic-level properties come from? I would say they are emergent properties.
On a far larger scale we have simple neurons and to a large degree we do understand how they work as individual neurons. Get a bunch of these simple, understandable neurons together, however, and they are able to function in ways that we can’t even begin to understand.
Whether the properties of the configuration of individual parts are latent within those parts is not terribly important if the only way those properties can be expressed is through the configuration of a multitude of them. The exact mechanism need not be known to observe that collections of neurons can think while a single neuron may not, just as collections of fundamental particles can behave in ways a single particle may not. The recognition of emergent properties is something distinct from determining how exactly those properties emerge.
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