I can’t continue the discussion, since you abandoned reason for faith. “It just does” doesn’t cut it on a philosophy forum.
You’re being silly now.
How you can you reject your own direct literal real world personal observation as being “abandoned reason” is beyond me. There’s hardly anything you could do that’s more unreasonable than that. I don’t know why the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the body is the way it is. I did not design the way things are. I just know by personal experience the way things work, and so I use that practical information to live a better life.
Once you regard self reflective observation of your own thoughts and emotions as “abandoning reason for faith”, all there is left is an unexamined life… so I’ll leave you to what you have already freely chosen with all of its consequences.
How you can you reject your own direct literal real world personal observation as being “abandoned reason” is beyond me. There’s hardly anything you could do that’s more unreasonable than that. I don’t know why the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the body is the way it is. I did not design the way things are. I just know by personal experience the way things work, and so I use that practical information to live a better life.
Once you regard self reflective observation of your own thoughts and emotions as “abandoning reason for faith”, all there is left is an unexamined life… so I’ll leave you to what you have already freely chosen with all of its consequences.
… and I made that perfectly clear from day one. There is no conflict between Ayn Rand’s objective sense of moral justice and how I regard God’s to be. And I don’t believe in the liberals’ religious fantasies of God any more than she did.
From the infintessimally exquisite quantum particle dance… to the billions of light years of great rotating galaxies… to a planet with liquid water… to the 50 trillion living cells in your body… to the moral law everyone answers to whether they like it or not.
I had never realized that knowledge itself implies the fact that humans possess free will.
It DOESN’T. A computer can have knowledge in the form of encoded information and modern computers are absolutely deterministic. Furthermore, determinism does not imply predictability nor does it imply chaos. That is a false dichotomy. Nonlinear deterministic systems are not 100% predictable even though they are not truly random. Uncertainy exists due to nonlinearity; and particularly due to heavily nested feedback loops. Determinism means that there are no hidden variables. A good example of non-determinism is radioactive decay which is is totally random because radioactive nuclei cannot exchange information with each other. Uncertainty in a nonlinear system is bounded and its occurence, though not predictable, has measurable constraints.
A mans ideas often come to him when his brain is analyzing or calculating something and an idea sneaks of up on him and he’s like…EUREKA! The same is often true when it comes to creative ideas for art, music, and writing. That being said, ideas can come from a deterministic process in the brain but they also arise chaotically without deliberate intent.
Now if there actually is a higher power that governs us and the rest of the Cosmos, I would wager that this higher power has not bestowed us with true free will but would like us to think we are in control of our thoughts and actions. But one thing is clear: Free will does not apply to emotions. *Feelings* cannot be turned on and off by conscious intent, but they can be manipulated indirectly.
A mans ideas often come to him when his brain is analyzing or calculating something and an idea sneaks of up on him and he’s like…EUREKA! The same is often true when it comes to creative ideas for art, music, and writing. That being said, ideas can come from a deterministic process in the brain but they also arise chaotically without deliberate intent.
It DOESN’T. A computer can have knowledge in the form of encoded information and modern computers are absolutely deterministic.
This statement is in error because it equivocates knowledge with information. They are not interchangeable concepts. Knowledge requires and implies the existence of a knower, but information does not. Computers (common Harvard architecture computers of all sizes and speeds) do not qualify as knowers, they merely hold and serve up information. A knower requires and implies the power to correct its own errors, and to recognize error as a failure of correspondence between what exists and what it regards as knowledge. Information is a primitive physical quantity, analogous to length or mass, measured in units of bits.
Ok. If the brain (the physical) is also the mind, then the brain/mind is a purely physical “thing”. Since all thought, which is the start if all action, i.e. volition and/or free will, is simply the result of an electro-chemical reaction in the brain, one has to ask what the prime instigator of that thought is. N’est ce pas?
Answer: Ion transporting through a semi-permeable membrane.
And yes the brain is our mind in the sense that the process we call mind (or better yet, minding) is the emergent effect of physical causes.
Answer: Ion transporting through a semi-permeable membrane.
And yes the brain is our mind in the sense that the process we call mind (or better yet, minding) is the emergent effect of physical causes.
ruveyn1
How do I get rid of this damned bolding?
Highlight the affected letters and cycle the B a few times. When I quoted your post, it appeared that the B got stuck and didn’t recognize that they were bold.
I see the brain and the mind differently. I see the activity of the brain as an effect of the mind.
Why the discussion about mind/brain dicothomy? In a philosophic sense it doesn’t matter , unless you are trying to show that consciousness does not exist. If you agree that consciousness exists , than the scientific explanation of the phenomenon is tangential to consciousness as such. If it could be shown that the mind actually resides or emerges from the liver, how would that change or affect what consciousness is?
Why the discussion about mind/brain dicothomy? In a philosophic sense it doesn’t matter , unless you are trying to show that consciousness does not exist. If you agree that consciousness exists , than the scientific explanation of the phenomenon is tangential to consciousness as such. If it could be shown that the mind actually resides or emerges from the liver, how would that change or affect what consciousness is?
Yes. You can get a liver transplant. You can’t get a brain transplant.
