Well, I suppose there are instances:
...etc
Posted on 05/24/2006 2:05:53 PM PDT by flixxx
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Religious arguments have permeated debates on the role of the law in medical practice at the beginning and the end of life. But nowhere has religion played so prominent a role as in the century-old quest to banish or marginalize the teaching of evolution in science classes. Nor has new genetics research that supports evolutionary theory at the molecular level dampened antievolution sentiment.1 Requiring public-school science teachers to teach specific religion-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution is just as bad, in the words of political comedian Bill Maher, as requiring obstetricians to teach medical students the alternative theory that storks deliver babies. Nonetheless, stork lore is not religious lore, and the central constitutional objection to banning evolution from the public-school curriculum or marginalizing it is that this would violate the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment, which provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The United States has had two waves of religion-inspired antievolution activism, and a decision by U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III made just before Christmas 2005 marks the end of the third wave.2
(Excerpt) Read more at content.nejm.org ...
Aside from the obvious physical workings of the brain that *are* abstractions, my use of the term abstractions was to differentiate the idea from the reality. To go back to the laws of physics; there are no laws as such, they are simply our way of describing interactions that do have a physical basis. We make observations of the physical world and through those observations a consistency of interaction appears. In other words, they become predicable. Those interactions are materialistic in the sense that the consequences of those interactions can be physically perceived. We know of gravity because we witness the interaction and attraction of two (or more) masses. Those interactions can be modeled mathematically. That mathematical model is an abstraction of the observation that the interactions happen predictably. The 'law' has no real existence but the event the abstraction is based on does have material existence. Giving a physical law an existence whether material or ethereal is a simple reification of the abstract.
Don't view my comments about physical laws outside of the context of my discussion with BB, where she gave the laws a non-material existence. The 'laws' do not exist - what does exist are the very material objects and their interactions which can be measured.
"Again, speaking of consciousness and reason as "interacting" with the physical world is to speak of them as having existence and yet being separate and somehow not part of the physical world. In the physicalist view, how can something exist that is not part of the physical universe? Consciousness and reason may have "physical consequences" but at the same time, if that that is all they ARE, ie, nothing but a physical consequence of some other physical consequence, then what does it mean to speak of them as separate and distinct from the physical world?
That is my point.
Consciousness and reason (which are subsets of 'mind') are labels we apply to the material biochemical and bioelectrical interactions of the brain. We speak of them in the abstract, as a tool to understanding, but the use of that tool does not give 'mind' an existence outside of the real physicality of the brain.
"It seems like a contradiction in terms. The physicalist's thought that TRUTH itself, and LOGIC, and REASON are ultimately nothing but concatenations of atoms, the product of physical forces of either chance or necessity, claims for itself a validity that is not credible if thoughts themselves are nothing but the by products of brute physical forces, the accidental concatenations of atoms in a brain.
Why?
"Well; the ToE says that these are BECOMING legs and whales will walk on land!
No that is not what the SToE says at all. The removal of parts that have a higher cost than benefit is every bit as much a part of the SToE as the addition of new functions/features. In fact the SToe states that a simple change in function of an existing feature and a consequential change in the feature is as likely as a change in feature will affect its consequent function.
"There should be MUCH more INCOMING, new parts than OUTGOING,old parts, don't you think??
Why?
Only if you assume that evolution has a goal could you make the statement you made above.
You are correct to a certain degree but not for the reasons you suppose.
The formation of new features/functions and the removal of old features/functions is based on a cost/benefit ratio. This cost/benefit ratio is applied to both energy costs and reproductive costs. If the acquisition of a new function/feature benefits the organism more than it costs the organism to build and support the function/feature, that function/feature will be passed to the next generation. If the costs of retaining a function/feature are higher than the benefit the function/feature gives the function will not be retained. If the cost/benefit ratio is equal to one, then the function/feature will be in stasis (it will still be affected by drift). In some cases, as the high cost feature is reduced it may hit a point of stasis before disappearing altogether.
What this results in are organisms where the high benefit features are seen as a normal part of the organism and the high cost features, if still present in some form, are seen as vestigial.
You have a rather poor understanding of what the SToE actually says in this regard. I suspect you have restricted your research to creationist sites.
Let me try this, b_sharp. It appears your basic assumption is that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the physical processes of the brain, which is itself a physical system fully integrated into the larger physical system of the world, or universe. That is to say, the operations of the mind depend on the interactions of brain and world and nothing more.
The next step in this line of reasoning (I suppose) is to say the mind/brain "system" only deals with the interpretation of sense data that come to us by means of the physical inputs of our sensory apparatus.
But it seems quite clear (and if you were actually to study your own thought processes, you'd probably see this is true as well) there are higher functions or operations of mind that do not directly depend on physical inputs at all: If, say, you were to remove all sensory inputs (or as many as possible), the mind's activity would not cease. (This has been experimentally demonstrated in immersion-tank and other kinds of studies.)
Logic and reasoning are such operations. So are recollections and reflections from memory. Then there is the case of dreaming: The mind remains active even when we are not conscious of sensory inputs at all. This is to say that the mind is not a "fully integrated physical system": Some of its operations are decidedly non-physically-induced productions, in the strict sense that they are not responses to direct inputs of sensory data.
Therefore, mind does not "reduce" to simple data processing of physical inputs received via our senses, but has operations that "transcend" such inputs. To the extent that mind ties into the physical system of the world via the mediation of the brain, and yet has functions that do not depend on sensory processing at all, then the mind must have some "independence" of the brain, in that the brain (as a processing system geared to sense data) does not wholly determine its functions. (Though certainly it might seem strange to say it!)
Therefore, mind cannot be an epiphenomenon of the brain. If it were, it would be incapable of handling abstract thought at all. (And the mind does that sort of thing routinely, as we would notice if we bothered to pay attention to what is going on in our own "heads.")
We were speaking of Realism earlier. Realism certainly recognizes those activities of mind that are not the productions of direct sensory inputs, where Nominalism or Materialism certainly do not.
This is why both Plato and Aristotle are classified as Realists. Both devoted themselves to exploring such non-phenomenally generated operations of mind, and were among the first to distinguish between "intentionalist consciousness" -- which is the backbone of the scientific method -- and "luminous consciousness," which involves mental functions that arise from interior resources from within the psyche itself. The mind looks to both the "outer" and the "inner" processes and products of thought.
Just some stray thoughts. Hope they make sense.
Thanks b_sharp, for inviting me to your discussion with Diamond!
Because to say that the the subsets of mind such as truth and reason are nothing but the product of brute physical forces of an utterly irrational universe of either chance or mechanical necessity is to say that truth and reason are fundamentally irrational, which seems like a direct contradiction in terms.
Words uttered merely because some thing in brains has triggered them renders the idea of knowledge itself unintelligible.
Cordially,
Uh, what you're calling "realism" here is precisely what the rest of the English speaking world calls "idealism".
In an earlier post, you alleged that Plato was, not a Realist, but an Idealist (implying that Aristotle was the Realist, and Plato some fuzzy-headed contemplator of fictional Ideas and Forms).
With or without the judgment that it is "fuzzy headed," this certainly is the theory that Plato teaches in The Republic and elsewhere: that ordinary (real) objects reflect ideal "forms" that exist independently of and apart from the distorted and imperfect reflections of them that we experience in real objects.
The ideal forms exist in a world apart. We cannot perceive them directly, but only through reason. They are IDEAS of "redness," or "hardness" or "chairness" or "roseness" or "love" or "justice" and etc. Thus Plato is an IDEALIST. He argued that ideas give real objects their forms, but these ideas exist prior to and apart from (and are actually more authentic than) such real world instantiations of them.
They must be teaching classical Greek metaphysics in strange ways these days;
My understanding of Plato comes from my own reading (although it's been awhile) of his dialogs. Of course I've also read many secondary sources over the years that discuss Plato.
because in the history of philosophy, Plato is regarded as an "absolute Realist," and Aristotle, a "moderate Realist."
Until you I've never heard or read, or heard or read of, anyone describing Plato as realist.
And yet "things" in the brain indisputably DO move, change states, etc, when we speak. And indisputably the ability to speak (or reason, or remember, etc) can be affected, even eliminated, by damage to physical structure in the brain. Indisputably simulating certain structures in the brain can cause involuntary memories, thoughts, speech, and etc.
So why in the heck is it rational to say "all these physical things happen in detailed coordination with an independent substance called 'mind' (even though I can't show you any instance of 'mind' apart from such physical goings on, but take my word for its independent existence anyway...)"
But "utterly irrational" to say, "well, you know, maybe these physical things happening in brains are entirely what causes 'minds' to exist, since after all we've never witnessed and can't point to any other causes or correlates of 'minds'."?
Wouldn't it be more usual if nothing in the brain triggered most spoken words?
No assumption needed. The ToE relys upon mutations: some good, some bad, MOST nuetral.
WHERE are all the nuetral ones??
Somehow, I am not at all surprised by this news. However, I imagine it has something to do with the "dumbing down" of modern education. That, and the rise of ideologies in the post-Enlightenment period. (The former serves the latter; or so it seems to me. And as Lenin would say, "this is no accident.")
However, as a dedicated, life-long student of Western culture, which is founded in Athens (classical metaphysics) and Jerusalem (Judeo-Christian spirituality), and which definitely includes the magnificent history of science, I can testify that the representations I have made about the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and how they are "classified" within the millennial philosophical experience of the West, represent the traditional, or historical view of the great contributions of these two peerless thinkers. And if you need sources to corroborate my statements, just let me know.
Well, I suppose there are instances:
...etc
You attach significance to this distinction -- between percepts and abstract thoughts -- but I'd say it's an arbitrary distinction. I don't see how anything (at least anything that you claim) follows from it.
Perceptions are themselves, in most cases, the constructs of highly complex mental operations, and themselves contain significant levels of abstraction.
Take even, say, visual perception, which is probably the best understood as far as brain mapping down to the cell level. There are numerous, and utterly mundane, respects in which we see things differently from how they actually are. There are many familiar optical illusions illustrating this. For instance there's a rather large blank spot in our visual field (in each eye that is) where the optic nerves pass through the retina. We never "see" these "blind spots" (except when we notice a mark or some such mysteriously disappear in an appropriately designed optical illusion) because our brains (minds?) interpolate the missing information for us.
There are even optical illusions that depend on the automatic application of abstract ideas and generalizations of experience. One such is the notion that light sources generally shine down on a scene. This can lead to misinterpreting convexities and concavities, and gratuitous differences in depth perception, as in this optical illusion.
In short our brains always "recreate" reality for us in complex ways, incorporating numerous assumptions, extrapolations, tricks, kludges, etc, whether dealing with "direct" perception or memories or what have you. It's never a simple, mechanical, one-for-one-correspondence-to-reality that's presented to our mind in the process of perception, or in the process of cognition. Indeed perception invariably includes and incorporates cognitive functions. (And many "purely" cognitive functions share brain structures and functions with "purely" perceptive functions.)
On the other hand your examples such as abstract thought, memories and so on... WHY do they prove the independence (or some degree thereof) of the mind from the brain? You just assert they do because they aren't (directly) driven by (immediate) sensory inputs. So what? There are still obvious and meticulous correlations of these (non sensory driven) processes with brain structure and function, and no specific evidence of their independence therefrom.
Let me repeat. I've read ALL of Plato's dialogs. (Admittedly not in the original Greek!) It is therefrom that I have my understanding of Plato's theory of forms. Not from "modern education," "dumbed down" or otherwise.
That is correct.
"The next step in this line of reasoning (I suppose) is to say the mind/brain "system" only deals with the interpretation of sense data that come to us by means of the physical inputs of our sensory apparatus.
That is also correct (at least in one sense).
"But it seems quite clear (and if you were actually to study your own thought processes, you'd probably see this is true as well) there are higher functions or operations of mind that do not directly depend on physical inputs at all: If, say, you were to remove all sensory inputs (or as many as possible), the mind's activity would not cease. (This has been experimentally demonstrated in immersion-tank and other kinds of studies.)
Studying my own thought processes to determine the validity of a material consciousness is hardly scientific.
Yes indeed the biochemical/bioelectrical process do continue if all physical inputs are removed. However those processes are still materially based processes. You are ignoring a number of aspects of the brain, specifically the physical storage of memory and the synaptic connections created during the ontogenetic process.
"Logic and reasoning are such operations. So are recollections and reflections from memory.
You are developing a false dichotomy here, that the material existence of the mind depends exclusively on external stimuli and the non-material existence of the mind is verified by everything else. Tests using electrical inputs to portions of the brain have triggered thoughts, feelings, smells, sights, sounds, pretty much the entire gamut of the human experiential range. All of these experiences are stored in the physical makeup of the brain. If you deprive the brain of external stimuli as in the test you mentioned earlier, the brain still has available to it the entire store of previous experience. This is hardly verification that mental activity in spite of a restriction of external stimuli is non-material.
"Then there is the case of dreaming: The mind remains active even when we are not conscious of sensory inputs at all. This is to say that the mind is not a "fully integrated physical system": Some of its operations are decidedly non-physically-induced productions, in the strict sense that they are not responses to direct inputs of sensory data.
I'm sorry but you lost me. Are you trying to say that dreaming is not the result of an increase in the synaptic firing rate in the brain?
If you want to show that the 'mind' and all it's processes are not material you would have to have evidence that thinking, dreaming, problem solving, or any other mental process can continue without the very material electrical/chemical processes in the brain. (Actually there is some indication that the brain stem and spinal cord also contribute to 'mind')
"Therefore, mind does not "reduce" to simple data processing of physical inputs received via our senses, but has operations that "transcend" such inputs.
You have not shown this at all. The physical processes in the brain do not rely exclusively on current sensory inputs but can also use stored sensory inputs, as well as the non-consious 'thoughts' we are born with. You cannot separate the measurable physical activity in the brain from the 'mind'. Without synaptic firing there is no 'mind', with synaptic firing we experience emotions, dreams, reason and logic.
"To the extent that mind ties into the physical system of the world via the mediation of the brain, and yet has functions that do not depend on sensory processing at all, then the mind must have some "independence" of the brain, in that the brain (as a processing system geared to sense data) does not wholly determine its functions. (Though certainly it might seem strange to say it!)
Sorry but you are incorrectly assuming that the physicality of the brain relies exclusively on sensory input 'of the moment'. Because you have made an error in your premise your conclusion is also in error.
"Therefore, mind cannot be an epiphenomenon of the brain. If it were, it would be incapable of handling abstract thought at all. (And the mind does that sort of thing routinely, as we would notice if we bothered to pay attention to what is going on in our own "heads.")
I'm sorry but I do not understand your logic here. Abstract thought is very much the result of the biophysics of the brain. What is it again that prevents the brain from producing abstract thought?
"We were speaking of Realism earlier. Realism certainly recognizes those activities of mind that are not the productions of direct sensory inputs, where Nominalism or Materialism certainly do not.
I'm sorry but I'm not really interested in those particular labels nor in being classified.
"This is why both Plato and Aristotle are classified as Realists. Both devoted themselves to exploring such non-phenomenally generated operations of mind, and were among the first to distinguish between "intentionalist consciousness" -- which is the backbone of the scientific method -- and "luminous consciousness," which involves mental functions that arise from interior resources from within the psyche itself. The mind looks to both the "outer" and the "inner" processes and products of thought.
And neither of them had the technology to perform tests on the brain. I'm afraid the best way to determine if the mind and brain are one is not to simply 'think about it' but to run tests that are repeatable and verifiable. That is the scientific method.
"Just some stray thoughts. Hope they make sense.
They do. However, I do disagree with them and feel you missed some important points. You need to address the physical evidence that 'mind' *is* brain activity.
"Thanks b_sharp, for inviting me to your discussion with Diamond!
No, thank you! Glad to have an intelligence such as yours in the debate.
You are using the term 'irrational' equivocally. You are also using 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'. Whether the universe is irrational (is not the product of mind) has no bearing on the rationality (the ability to reason) of the human (or any other animal's) mind.
Uh, what you're calling "realism" here is precisely what the rest of the English speaking world calls "idealism".
I asked a friend of mine, who is a Philosopher of Science, about this and he says that the meanings of 'idealist' and realist' inverted in the 17th century. It is possible you are both right (depending on time period you pull your information from).
"No assumption needed. The ToE relys upon mutations: some good, some bad, MOST nuetral."
"WHERE are all the nuetral ones??
What does the need for mutations have to do with evolution having a goal?
First you need to understand what a mutation is. I suspect you believe that all mutations are the distortions we see on Nova and other sensationalist renderings of saltational changes that are frequently the result of errors during ontogenesis. This isn't what we are talking about when we refer to mutations. What we are talking about are changes to the genome, a changed/added/removed nucleotide, a multi nucleotide indel, a flipped gene, a duplicated gene, anything that can occur during meiosis. The vast majority of mutations involve a single nucleotide, ~1/3 of which are automatically neutral since a change in the third nucleotide in a codon does not change the amino acid produced. (They can sometimes change the protein slightly) These will have no phenotypic effect. These neutral mutations are obvious in the genome.
Other neutral mutations are mutations that result in a different amino acid or protein but any phenotypic change is invisible to selection. These mutations, by the very fact they are neutral will generally have minor phenotypic expression. As evidenced by examination of the genome, these neutral mutations can add up to a point where they are no longer invisible to selection and become either beneficial or detrimental to the organisms reproductive success. It is also possible for a neutral mutation to have a more pronounced phenotypic expression that at some future date, if environmental changes occur, will become deleterious or beneficial given the changed environment.
Very little of the morphology of an organism is externally visible, the vast majority is internal and only observable if you open up the organism.
Would you recognize a neutral mutation if you saw it?
No, you're quite wrong here. The site I linked to is specifically arguing against ID, by showing that the "I" is sometimes not apparent.
The arguments for standard biology are quite different: the stratification of fossils, shared genetic markers, biogeography, and so on and so on.
There are lots of ... uhmmm ....suboptimal ... structures found in nature.. [followed by a quote from Dempski].
I was using "... uhmmm ....suboptimal ... " as a euphemism for "really stupid".
Not even Lucas Electrics wires cars with the analog of the recurrent laryngeal nerve: the wire from the dashboard to the motor that raises the driver-side window looping around the rear axle, the one for the passenger-side looping around the transmission.
A quote from Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, referring to the male urethra
A mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer and a civil engineer were discussing the human body in the pub. "The body was clearly designed by a mechanical engineer... look at all the levers and joints." "No no no, it was obviously designed by a chemist, it's full of amazing chemical reactions!" "I'm sorry", said the civil engineer, "but it was undoubtedly a civil engineer. I've run countless sewage pipes through recreational areas myself..."
Read the link; lots of interesting natural history.
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