(2023-06-03, 03:36 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]Sciborg_S_Patel,
You write this in response to my questions about what you think holds our memories. You tell us the brain does not do this. OK, then what remembers? The soul? And was my grandmother's soul aware that I was there? If my grandmother's soul knew I was there, and her soul was not damaged by the stroke, why did my grandmother lose the ability to remember that I visited her?
If the brain mediates the interaction of consciousness/soul with our terrestrial existence, it's entirely possible damage to it affects access or even formation of memories. In regards to the latter, however, as
noted it seems that s
ome research suggests the issue is not memory formation but memory access [sadly the article makes the common mistake that brains can store memories, something that Tallis in my quotes below notes is not possible]->
Quote:People who permanently suffer from amnesia can’t add new declarative or episodic memories. The parts of their brains involved in storing this type of information, primarily a region called the hippocampus, have been damaged. Although amnesiacs can retain new information temporarily, they generally forget it a few minutes later.
If our dreams come from declarative memories, people with amnesia shouldn’t dream at all, or at least dream differently than others do. But new research directed by Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School suggests quite the opposite.
Just like people with normal memory, amnesiacs replay recent experiences when they fall asleep, Stickgold’s study shows. The only difference seems to be that the amnesiacs don’t recognize what they’re dreaming about.
Though I am not sure why stroke would show something that regular forgetting doesn't. I just watched the last John Wick movie but don't recall every detail.
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Moving on, to be clear the insurmountable flaws with materialist accounts of consciousness mentioned below are not proof that there are souls. However they do strongly suggest to me that *if* there are souls said souls are not lobotomized wraiths.
Quote:I don't see anywhere that this link supports the assertion that brains cannot hold memories. Even the simplest animals can have memories. Do they all have souls?
Tallis explicitly notes the issue and he doesn't believe in souls. To quote some small bits of the larger argument that requires reading the whole piece ->
"Well, I don’t believe that the difference between Kandel’s ‘memory in a dish’ and my actual memory is just a matter of the size of the nervous system or the number or complexity of the neurons in it. Clarifying this difference will enable us to see what is truly mysterious in memory..."
"...Making present something that is past as something past, that is to say, absent, hardly looks like a job that a piece of matter could perform, even a complex electrochemical process in a piece of matter such as a brain. But we need to specify more clearly why not. Material objects are what they are, not what they have been, any more than they are what they will be. Thus a changed synaptic connexion is bits present state; it is not also the causes of its present state. Nor is the connection ‘about’ that which caused its changed state or its increased propensity to fire in response to cues. Even less is it about those causes located at a temporal distance from its present state. A paper published in Science last year by Itzhak Fried claiming to solve the problem of memory actually underlines this point. The author found that the same neurons were active in the same way when an individual remembered a scene (actually from The Simpsons) as when they watched it.
So how did people ever imagine that a ‘cerebral deposit’ (to use Henri Bergson’s sardonic phrase) could be about that which caused its altered state? Isn’t it because they smuggled consciousness into their idea of the relationship between the altered synapse and that which caused the alteration, so that they could then imagine that the one could be ‘about’ the other? Once you allow that, then the present state of anything can be a sign of the past events that brought about its present state, and the past can be present. For example, a broken cup can signify to me (a conscious being when I last checked) the unfortunate event that resulted in its unhappy state.
Of course, smuggling in consciousness like this is inadmissible, because the synapses are supposed to supply the consciousness that reaches back in time to the causes of the synapses’ present states. And there is another, more profound reason why the cerebral deposit does not deliver what some neurophysiologists want it to, which goes right to the heart of the nature of the material world and the physicist’s account of its reality – something that this article has been circling round. I am referring to the mystery of tensed time; the mystery of an explicit past, future and present..."
Quote:Even sunflowers can "decide" to point their flower toward the sun. Do sunflowers also have souls?
Where do these souls come from?
I don't see why it is a problem for sunflowers to have souls, but as Tallis notes in the example of the sea slug these rote responses don't require any aboutness or subjectivity that are the hallmarks of human memories.
Quote:Why cannot physical brains hold memories?
For the same reason that Alex Rosenberg notes in the Atheist's Guide to Reality - as quoted in my previous posts in this thread (
for example here) - that neurons cannot be about Paris, because physical things have no intrinsic aboutness. See also the Tallis quotes above how this problem is compounded when physical brains have to extend this aboutness to past events.
Quote:Let's say I see the color red for the first time. A distinct brain pattern forms in some of my neurons. Suppose somebody tells me that color I saw is named red. A different distinct pattern forms for the sequence of sounds that make the word "red". Why cannot those patterns simply be etched into my neurons, much like a computer stores memories?
Computers don't store conscious memories any more than an abacus does. Without a human observer these are just meaningless arrangements of matter. As Tallis notes above this is just smuggling in the consciousness that needs to be explained.
Quote:Then later, when I see something red, many thought patterns may be stimulated in my brain, but those patterns that are strongly associated with the red color I am seeing will predominate. If you ask me what color I see, those brain patterns associated with the sound pattern for the word red will predominate, and win out over any other brain patterns. My brain will direct my mouth to say, "red"? We refer to this as "memory". I see no reason to believe molecules cannot do that.
But how are the patterns about redness unless, as Tallis notes above, one has already smuggled in the consciousness that is supposed to be explained by the material brain?
Quote:It seems to me that there is no other way to remember anything, other than for some change to occur in the state of something. If, for instance, you now remember my name, surely the state of something somewhere must be different compared to the state it was in when you did not recognize my name. What changed state? If matter does the remembering, that question is easy to answer: the matter in your brain changed state. Your brain now has brain patterns associated with "Merle" that are associated with brain patterns that are associated with the things you now know about me.
But if a change in matter is what resulted in memory then there would need be a perfect isomorphism between the material and the conscious memory. As Braude noted in the
previously linked Memory Without a Trace, this is an impossible object because any bit of matter can represent a variety of possible things ->
Quote:...Trace theorists have always been tempted to regard traces as kinds of recordings of the things that produced them. In fact, some previous influential writings on memory compared traces to tape recordings or grooves and bumps in a phonograph record. The justification for that idea, as we’ve seen, is that traces must somehow capture essential structural features of the things that both produce and activate them. That’s one of the keys to how trace theory is supposed to work. Allegedly, what links together and unifies traces both with their causes and their activators is a common underlying structure.
So the issue we must now address is: What sort of thing is this structure? I’ll argue that the required structure is an impossible object...
One could seek to cross this divide by saying the material is storing Information, but as
has noted this opens many questions that leave the materialist-reductionist position open to attack.
In fact as the biologist Johnjoe McFadden notes it can even be a tentative argument for Post Morterm Survival ->
Quote:My hypothesis is that conciousness is the experience of information, from the inside. There is a postulate in physics that information is neither created or detroyed – the conservation of information ‘law’. It is however just a postulate, nobody has ever proved it. But, if true, it would suggest that awareness (associated with that information) – in some form – might survive death.
Of course if information is neither created nor destroyed, it again becomes difficult for me to see why a soul could not have access to this information. So, again, I don't understand why *if* one accepts souls one must also accept that said souls must be lobotomized wraiths.