Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

I just think we need to account for the world impacting the mind -> Diets and Depression, Alcohol, Psychedelics, etc.

A reduction valve, to me, gets us in the right direction but like many analogies I think it isn't quite up to describing what is happening.

I kinda feel like no analogy will ever be able to completely explain everything. It seems like there will always be something just out of reach. Though obviously finding the best analogy we can is still a good idea.

Re: History of the Filter Theory:

The transmission theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production theory. I refer to those obscure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout human history, which the “psychical researchers,” with Mr. Frederic Myers at their head, are doing so much to rehabilitate; such phenomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things.
  -William James

As per the book Beyond Physicalism ->

Two ideas are crucial to James’s model. The first concerns the “transcendental world.” Myers would call it the metetherial environment or World-Soul; Emerson, the Over-Soul; Aldous Huxley, Mind at Large; Carl du Prel, the Transcendental Ego, etc. Our individual minds are surface growths that appear separate and distinct but whose roots lie in a deeper psychic underground; there we are mutually entangled and part of a more extended mental system.

The second idea is one that James owes to Gustav Fechner, concerning the notion of a psychophysical threshold (see James, 1898/ 1961, pp. 295– 298, long footnote). It is the mobility of this threshold upon which turns the explanatory and the experimental potential of the transmission model. Lower the threshold and the contents of the subliminal mind become more accessible; this can come about by deliberate shamanic or mystical practice or by chance, blows to the head, or near-death experiences. In the normal struggle to adapt to the physical world, consciousness is confined and colored by contingent, body-mediated experience; we therefore mostly live our lives oblivious to any hint of our deep interior selves.

Technically, James’s move in this work is to posit substance dualism, a step beyond property dualism. According to the latter, mind is an irreducible property of living brains but is causally inert and supervenes on brain activity. Hence property dualism is not strong enough to carry the burden of survival or of any paranormal or mystical phenomena. It is a feckless philosophical position deeply at odds with human experience. According to the transmission model, however, mind is not a property of the brain but a user of the brain, indeed a person who enjoys autonomous self-existence. Few academically trained people are prepared to entertain substance dualism nowadays;[ 2] but few of them pay much attention to experiences characterized as supernormal, mystical, and the like, experiences that challenge mainline views of mind and body.

Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kindle Locations 1913-1927). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

https://mindsetfree.blog/dare-to-questio...ter-death/

https://mindsetfree.blog/if-only-souls-had-a-brain/

Personally I find pretty hard to fit some neuroscience findings with a non-materialist position like a "filter" if you remove NDE's, in spite of some gaps on the regular physicalist position and even with them there is nothing conclusive.

While I don't agree 100% with what Merle says (Specially about Keith Augustine's hypocritical criticism of survival studies) the general idea is not hard to defend.

https://mindsetfree.blog/dare-to-questio...ter-death/

https://mindsetfree.blog/if-only-souls-had-a-brain/

Personally I find pretty hard to fit some neuroscience findings with a non-materialist position like a "filter" if you remove NDE's, in spite of some gaps on the regular physicalist position and even with them there is nothing conclusive.

While I don't agree 100% with what Merle says (Specially about Keith Augustine's hypocritical criticism of survival studies) the general idea is not hard to defend.

This blogger has many misconceptions and misunderstandings about what the soul is. On top of that, he conflates the mind with the soul far too much.

By my personal understanding, from personal experience, and therefore, by my definition, the soul is almost entirely disincarnate, being not within the body, nor affected by anything that happens to it.

The small portion of soul that is incarnate, being within the body, is what we can call mind, consciousness, ego, self, our sense of self, if you will.

And it is that small portion that is most dramatically affected by brain damage, because it is so closely intertwined with the brain, in whatever way that it is.

Damage or alter the brain, the "filter", and you damage or alter the mind's ability to function as it normally should, because whatever function the brain performs for the mind has been disrupted. Whether by brain damage or alteration by chemical influences, drugs or otherwise.

To my thinking, the brain acts perhaps as something closer to a "limiter", in that it restricts the memories and experiences that the mind may have access to. Like the "filter" analogy, it is imperfect and incomplete, because it does not and cannot really explain entirely how the brain functions. But it explains some aspects.

It is a view that is holistic, because it incorporates both mind and brain, rather than trying to reduce the mind down to meaningless brain noise. Meaningless, because without the context of what is happening to a mind in the moment, that brain noise is just that ~ meaningless noise.

I would dare neuroscientists to look at a bunch of raw brain noise, and try to guess, from that alone, what it says about the subject's then-current state. They're not allowed to cheat by matching brain noise to what they can observe the subject doing in real time.

I would dare neuroscientists to look at a bunch of raw brain noise, and try to guess, from that alone, what it says about the subject's then-current state. They're not allowed to cheat by matching brain noise to what they can observe the subject doing in real time.

Well, there are neuroscientific studies claiming to do "mind reading" by supposedly guessing what people are thinking through fMRI, but some are not convinced.

Well, there are neuroscientific studies claiming to do "mind reading" by supposedly guessing what people are thinking through fMRI, but some are not convinced.

Would be interesting to see how close or far they got to reality.

Well, there are neuroscientific studies claiming to do "mind reading" by supposedly guessing what people are thinking through fMRI, but some are not convinced.

Sounds like they are doing "body reading" - the brain is a chunk of physical matter. Even looking at facial expressions or unconscious movements (body language) we can sometimes infer what someone might be thinking. But we don't call it mind reading.

Sounds like they are doing "body reading" - the brain is a chunk of physical matter. Even looking at facial expressions or unconscious movements (body language) we can sometimes infer what someone might be thinking. But we don't call it mind reading.

The method of the article involved using AI to form a image based on fMRI that is supposedly based on what the test subjects were thinking.
Also, Mark Mahin on his blog published a critique of the study.
https://headtruth.blogspot.com/2023/03/m...e.html?m=1

Would be interesting to see how close or far they got to reality.

I think they'll eventually get very close if they can use the subjective reports of people who are hooked up to machines.

But this goes back the to mystery of psycho-physical harmony.

And there is still the Quus Problem.

How is a mere conscious experience, something akin to ‘headaches, tickles and nausea’,5 able to
represent so much? This question, and the worry it expresses, sound reasonable only because our
philosophical tradition, in so far as it accepts the reality of conscious experience at all, has
become used to dealing with a caricature of consciousness: what it’s like to see red, what it’s like
to taste lemons, what it’s like to feel pain. It is customary for philosophers to talk as though such
‘raw feels’ exhausted the nature of consciousness.6 But it is crazy to think that conscious
experience is exhausted by raw feels. Even if we stick to perceptual experience, its
representational powers vastly outstrip what the crude raw feels model allows for

Regarding Mind Set Free posts, nothing there seems new. Pseudo-skeptics seem to reinvent the wheel over and over, acting as if no one has heard or considered these objections.