(2023-06-01, 11:19 AM)quirkybrainmeat Wrote: [ -> ]This doesn't reduce the merit of the current understanding of neuroscience that, while not being slam dunk proof, is coherent with the regular materialist paradigm of the mind-brain relationship.
Sorry, what are you trying to say here?
(I honestly am not sure)
(2023-06-01, 04:09 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry, what are you trying to say here?
(I honestly am not sure)
The way brain damage causes changes to personalities and memories, as explained by Merle earlier, but unlike him I don't see that alone being a strong case, although it fits with a materialist understanding.
(2023-06-01, 04:19 PM)quirkybrainmeat Wrote: [ -> ]The way brain damage causes changes to personalities and memories, as explained by Merle earlier, but unlike him I don't see that alone being a strong case, although it fits with a materialist understanding.
Well as I said earlier if his faith in materialism and mortality is centered on that it is fine.
Not everyone has to believe in Survival.
"Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him." - EM Forester
However personality changes are subjective reports, and the brain you are looking at is a phenomenal representation of whatever the "brain" is underneath. As per Smythies, that brain that seem to be in your head is a representation just as the head is.
Why should we accept personality change reports and not Terminal Lucidity and Savant reports?
It seems Merle thinks his "If only the soul had a brain" argument is some kind of novel slam dunk....but it's really old hat...
Better to stick with arguing that the Resurrection never happened, Jesus was a fraud, or whatever the point of the site's Bible section exactly is than to jump into metaphysics without preparation. Like I don't know if I agree with any of that but it seems the better prepared / proper level:
Quote:[*]Dare to Question
[*]About
(2023-05-31, 04:24 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]See, for instance, the discussion of the meaning of the word "soul" on this thread. https://www.christianforums.com/threads/...t-76914698 .
Most of us are not Christians! I certainly am not - I gave it up aged 20! One particular issue was that some Christian friends insisted that Christ had to die on the cross because God could not disregard 'sins' - but could transfer the punishment to Christ!
I think Christians may have taken some valid ideas of the afterlife and distorted them out of all recognition.
I prefer not to use the word 'soul', precisely because of all its religious connotations.
David
(2023-06-01, 08:23 PM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]I prefer not to use the word 'soul', precisely because of all its religious connotations.
David
I kind of like soul as a term largely because I don't think at the end of the day people are all that concerned with metaphysical terminology but the question of Survival.
If Survival was accomplished by some kind of materialist set of fields I don't think most would have a problem with that, for example. (I don't think Materialism is logically possible but just giving an example.)
(2023-06-02, 03:26 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]I kind of like soul as a term largely because I don't think at the end of the day people are all that concerned with metaphysical terminology but the question of Survival.
If Survival was accomplished by some kind of materialist set of fields I don't think most would have a problem with that, for example. (I don't think Materialism is logically possible but just giving an example.)
OK, but first or all, as we have just seen, people take the word and use it in its Christian definition. If the word had not got any unfortunate connotations, I'd be glad to use it - and indeed, I am aware that I am slipping into using it.
I think the concept of a soul doesn't just address the idea of survival. The book by Garry Marcus about AI is extremely revealing. He reveals the way in which much of the stunning effects of AI are just trickery. For example there was a video a while back in which a robot went to a fridge, took out a can of beer and poured a glass (presumably for its creator)! It turns out that the contents of the fridge were carefully arranged to help it select the right can, and they had to record the video many times to get it right. Household robots that can do that are still not possible - at least as of the date he wrote that book.
Getting back to souls, Garry claims that AI must be possible because we manage to do this job and many others with ease. Yet throughout the book there is an incredible sense in which there is a huge tree of issues that would need to be solved. This makes me think that we are really seeing the difference between matter with and without a soul.
I presume a soul has access to some extra information - maybe bot the Akashic records, but something more like Rupert Sheldrake's Morphogenetic fields.
When I have finished his book and thought about it for a bit, I intend to write to him, pointing out that the limitations of AI are discussed on this forum devoted to psi! I hope to pique his interest.
David
(2023-06-02, 08:09 PM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]OK, but first or all, as we have just seen, people take the word and use it in its Christian definition. If the word had not got any unfortunate connotations, I'd be glad to use it - and indeed, I am aware that I am slipping into using it.
I think the concept of a soul doesn't just address the idea of survival. The book by Garry Marcus about AI is extremely revealing. He reveals the way in which much of the stunning effects of AI are just trickery. For example there was a video a while back in which a robot went to a fridge, took out a can of beer and poured a glass (presumably for its creator)! It turns out that the contents of the fridge were carefully arranged to help it select the right can, and they had to record the video many times to get it right. Household robots that can do that are still not possible - at least as of the date he wrote that book.
Getting back to souls, Garry claims that AI must be possible because we manage to do this job and many others with ease. Yet throughout the book there is an incredible sense in which there is a huge tree of issues that would need to be solved. This makes me think that we are really seeing the difference between matter with and without a soul.
I presume a soul has access to some extra information - maybe bot the Akashic records, but something more like Rupert Sheldrake's Morphogenetic fields.
When I have finished his book and thought about it for a bit, I intend to write to him, pointing out that the limitations of AI are discussed on this forum devoted to psi! I hope to pique his interest.
David
I guess I just don't see these AI issues as insurmountable, just stalled because of an over-reliance on machine "learning".
I fully expect robots to achieve capacity to drive, get beers, etc...It just requires some rethinking on how to solve these problems...
(2023-05-22, 10:52 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]It isn't clear that it is the soul that loses the ability to remember. But it's fine if you want/need to believe that death is the end.
"Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him" - EM Forester
Well, whatever my grandmother used for remembering was no longer working well. She had a hard time remembering new experiences after her stroke.
What is it that does the remembering? If the soul does the remembering, why was her soul no longer able to remember after the brain was damaged?
If the brain does the remembering, what would her soul know about her life on Earth after her brain was gone?
(2023-06-02, 10:49 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]Well, whatever my grandmother used for remembering was no longer working well. She had a hard time remembering new experiences after her stroke.
What is it that does the remembering? If the soul does the remembering, why was her soul no longer able to remember after the brain was damaged?
If the brain does the remembering, what would her soul know about her life on Earth after her brain was gone?
If the brain is just matter that has no consciousness,
then as noted by neuroscientist-philosopher Tallis in the article I previously linked it cannot hold memories.
Quote:That remembered smile is located in the past, so my memory is aware that it reaches across time. In the mind-independent physical world, no event is intrinsically past, present or future: it becomes so only with reference to a conscious, indeed self-conscious, being, who provides the reference point – the now which makes some events past, others future, and yet others present. The temporal depth created by memories, which hold open the distance between that which is here and now and that which is no longer, is a product of consciousness, and is not to be found in the material world. As Einstein wrote in a moving letter at the end of his life, “People like me who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I assume that those who think of memory as a material state of a material object – as a cerebral deposit – also believe in physics – in which case they cannot believe that tensed time exists in the brain, or more specifically, in synapses. A material object such as the brain may have a history that results in its being altered, but the previous state, the fact of alteration, or the time interval between the two states, are not present in the altered state. A synapse, like a broken cup, does not contain its previous state, the event that resulted in its being changed, the fact that it has changed, the elapsed time, or anything else containing the sense of its ‘pastness’ which would be necessary if it were the very material of memory. How could someone ever come to believe it could?
Those who imagine that experiments with Aplysia cast light on memory betray the origin of the erroneous belief that memory is inscribed in matter. The belief is based on a slither from memory as you and I understand it, to learning; from learning to altered behaviour; from altered behaviour to altered properties of the organism; and viola! – the materialisation of memory! However, with Einstein’s help, we can see that sincere materialists must acknowledge that they have no explanation of memory. Instead of thinking that memories can be located in the brain (or even more outrageously, captured in a dish), they ought to hold, along with Bergson, that “memory [cannot] settle within matter” even though (alas), “materiality begets oblivion.” In short, they should take off their dull materialist blinkers and acknowledge the wonderful mystery of memory.
Personally I don't think the material brain holds any memories or thoughts, but I do think your position that the brain is necessary for mental functioning is a reasonable position to have. (Tallis' position agrees with yours).
I just disagree on thoughts because as Rosenberg notes in the Atheist's Guide to Reality what is physical cannot hold thoughts, and on memories a physical device - even a biological one - would be a memory trace which to me seems like an idea rife with confusion ->
Memory without a Trace
Braude
Quote:So why is the concept of a memory trace fundamentally nonsensical? Let’s begin with an analogy drawn from John Heil’s outstanding critique of trace theory.4 Suppose I invite many guests to a party, and suppose I want to remember all the people who attended. Accordingly, I ask each guest to leave behind something (a trace) by which I can remember them. Let’s suppose each guest leaves behind a tennis ball. Clearly, I can’t use the balls to accomplish the task of remembering my party guests. For my strategy to work, the guests must deposit something reliably and specifically linked to them, and the balls obviously aren’t differentiated and unambiguous enough to establish a link only with the person who left it.
So perhaps it would help if each guest signed his or her own tennis ball or perhaps left a photo of himself or herself stuck to the ball. Unfortunately, this threatens an endless regress of strategies for remembering who attended my party. Nothing reliably (much less uniquely and unambiguously) links the signature or photo to the guest who attended. A guest could mischievously have signed someone else’s name or left behind a photo of another person. Or maybe the signature was illegible (most are), or perhaps the only photo available was of the person twenty-five years earlier (e.g., when he still had hair, or when he had a beard, wore eyeglasses, and was photographed outdoors, out of focus, and in a thick fog), or when he was dressed in a Halloween costume or some other disguise.
But now it looks like I need to remember in order to remember. A tennis ball isn’t specific enough to establish the required link to the person who left it. What the situation requires is an unambiguous representational calling card, and the tennis ball clearly doesn’t do the job. So we supposed that something else might make the tennis ball a more specific link—a signature or a photo. That is, we tried to employ a secondary memory mechanism (trace) so that I could remember what the original trace (the tennis ball) was a trace of. But the signature and photo are equally inadequate. They, too, can’t be linked unambiguously to a specific individual. Of course, if I could simply remember who wrote the signature or left behind the photo, then it’s not clear why I even needed the original tennis balls. If no memory mechanism is needed to make the connection from photo to photo donor or from illegible signature to its author, then we’ve conceded that remembering can occur without corresponding traces, and then no trace was needed in the first place to explain how I remember who attended my party. So in order to avoid that fatal concession, it looks like yet another memory mechanism will be required for me to remember who left behind (say) the illegible or phony signature or the fuzzy photo. And off we go on a regress of memory processeses. It seems that no matter what my party guests leave behind, nothing can be linked only to the guest who left it. We’ll always need something else, some other mechanism, for making the connection between the thing left behind and the individual who left it.
It seems to me memory can mediated by the brain but there is no storage mechanism in matter just like matter doesn't have the aboutness of thoughts. Those are located in what I guess we would call the "soul" though at that point I think "storage mechanism" is the wrong term...
I was thinking this morning that a short post might clarify my positions in this discussion:
1. I think it is quite reasonable to believe that there is no afterlife, that one holds the mind is dependent on the brain due to the brain changes affecting the mind in this life. This is not my position, but I feel it's a reasonable one.
2. What I think is bizarre is this idea that even if there is an afterlife, the mind's dependence of the brain would render it incapable of most/all function. If a person accepts Survival, and then looks at varied Survival cases in Reincarnation & NDEs, it seems pretty clear that memory function - along with a host of other capabilities - doesn't need a brain.