Posted on 09/18/2007 10:23:38 AM PDT by spirited irish
Ah, but if I've understood William James correctly, the phenomenon in question does not vanish under scrutiny. Science can "see it"; it just can't "explain" it. It has no method for explaining the observed mental phenomena of, for instance, intention, attention, and will. These are not involved with processing data of sense perception coming in from the external world, but are activities that are purely internal to the mind. And they can generate phenomenal effects in the exteral world. In other words, their contents do not arise from external stimulation, but from free selections and combinations of data that can be accessed from memory, which can then be additionally "processed" in new and different combinations, in newly meaningful ways.
There is no evidence to support the theory that this is "just" the brain doing all this. The brain facilitates, but is not the driver, of processes such as these. IOW, they are not epiphenomena of brain neural activity. Moreoever, as noted, since they can lead to external empirical effects, we can't call them epiphenomena; for part of the definition of an epiphenomenon is that it is something that cannot cause anything to happen.
Nothing except a hundred years of investigation into what happens when bits of the brain are damaged, and thousands of studies of brain activity using NMRI.
On the other side, you can't cite a single study showing any "mental" phenomenon that is not associated with brain activity.
I might also add the evidence of direct electrical stimulation of the brain, and the effects of psychoactive drugs.
There are plenty of creatures crawling around that have no nervous system at all yet have behavior. The brain-centrists choose to ignore all this and will never figure out what is going on.
Does the Internet per se qualify?
But I did not say that mental activity is "not associated" with brain activity. In fact, I said that the brain is a facilitator, but evidently not itself the driver, of the mental processes I mentioned (intention, attention, will). I do not think that NMR imaging could "capture" these phenomena. But that doesn't mean that such mental phenomena do not exist: They are the primary constituents of every thought process....
Memory is a powerful field of investigation. Many mental deficits such as aphasia exist due to brain lesions and while the function is debilitated, the memory is still there. Electrical stimulation of brain lobes apparently recalls vivid memories, yet where is the memory located? That’s the still unanswered question.
Great observations, RightWhale!
There is no location for memory. Memory is embodied in the structure and connections of the brain. If you wipe out enough structure you wipe out memories.
There is an artist who can no longer recall or think about color. He is quite lucid and can still do art, but his conception and memory of color is gone.
Many kinds of behavior follow this pattern: wipe out the area supporting the function and the function is gone. There is no evidence that mental events can take place that are no associated with neural activity.
Plants have “behavior.” It’s called tropism.
That activity is done entirely without a brain as you would define it. There is purpose of a kind and that is what startled Einstein when he saw it. What do you think of that data?
Plants do even more sophisticated things without neurons. They do have physical bodies, however, and I don't see anyone campaigning to give them citizenship status.
It amuses me to see folks argue out of one side of their mouths that we are not descended from single celled organisms, and that complex systems such as the brain could not possibly have evolved stepwise from simpler systems, but then, out of the other side, point out that functions such as tropisms, light sensitivity and such exist at the "lowest" levels of living things.
Tropisms are not nearly as sophisticated as neural activity, but they probably reflect some of the genetic heritage of the brain. We can just about understand tropisms at the level of chemistry. We will eventually understand the brain.
I’m sorry, I missed the connection between what I asked and what you offered: “Plants do even more sophisticated things without neurons. They do have physical bodies, however, and I don’t see anyone campaigning to give them citizenship status.” Perhaps you’d be so kind as to show me the connection with what I posted and ‘campaigning to give them citizenship status’. Was that just meant to be your method of derision in some obtuse condsecending way, or did you have a point of connection that I missed?
I will respond just as soon as you show some correndence between tropisms and my assertion the mental activity is always associated with brain activity.
Have a nice weekend. You’ve lost me completely with that last ‘obtusity’.
Sure. So the fact that we a naturalist view will eventually win must be inevitable?
Well sometimes the incredible turns out to be true. That is why they tend to be recorded in History. They are remarkable.
But consider a minute and you ought realize the vast majority of incredible propositions continue to lack credibility for good cause. Nobody bothers to claim "no runner will ever beat the 4 microsecond mile". The only claim made out loud was "no runner will ever beat the 4 minute mile." The former was too ridiculous to even make. Like material consciousness, the four microsecond mile is not plausible -- but at least we can understand what it actually means which is more then we can say for material consciousness.
But the remarkable thing is that we understand a lot about how the brain works, and the understanding is growing.
And as it does, and as absolutely no clue of what consciousness could possibly be is yet forthcoming, the weight of evidence grows against your view. Not that I mean an extra material mind is a valid scientific theory. A scientific theory needs to be something that could conceivably be falsified. But in this case it is something too axiomatic to human existence. More like an overly modest theory that "some material exists in the universe". Its so obvious there is no way to test it. At most you can conceive a theoretical universe where we are brains in jars being shown illusion. While nobody takes the brain and the jar thing as a serious possibility, at least we can conceive of such a thing, so reason does not rule it out entirely.
Centuries elapsed between Copernicus and Newton, and a couple more between Newton and Einstein. We still don’t have a satisfactory theory of gravity.
Intelligent falling probably isn’t a good candidate.
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