OrgoneConclusion said:

Satyr also doesn't need food and can subsist on light alone.

He just 'chooses' to eat.

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Good choice, imo.

I lost a lot of weight, and looked really bad...  For a while.  A couple years there were draining...  To say the least.

"10,000 days in the fire is long enough..."
-MJK

Yah, I suck at math, I know.

Veritas said:

Gentlepeople. 

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Ah, yes, that would be more accurate.

Biophoton field=Aura?

Great video by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt.  It shows we don't know as much about this as many assume.

For me, philosophy is another tool to do research for answers.  One tool, as in many cases, is better than two.

Great discussion by all imo.  I think many of us learned a few things.  I know I did.

zannennagara said:

The mental experience, consciousness, must be immaterial in the sense that it is not wholly within the boundaries of one material or even multiple materials - "material" being restrained to physical delimitation in the form of linguistic definition. We have a definition for brain, certain physical material that is distinct from the other material (including its components) in the body with other definitions, but functionally a brain always acts in concert with many of these other materials.

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This is interesting because it makes our envisioning of the brain inaccurate: in operation, the way we think about it, there's no such thing as brain, but brain+blood+oxygen+neurons+electrical signals+cetera. All of these things are materials, but the process by which they interoperate (e.g. the science itself) seems immaterial, although everything it describes may be material - for the reason that our words are these materialistic delimitations.

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The mental experience cannot be confined to the brain for the basic reason that everything experienced is not the brain. It's disingenuous to say that all mental experience originates in the brain, as the experience has foundation in some brain-external event. The experience of listening to music surely can't originate in the brain; the sound-system must be the origin, or maybe the cones in the speakers, or maybe the designer, or the recording engineer, instruments, musicians, ad inf. These sound waves enter the ears and skin and elicit some novel neural electricity.

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The con- in consciousness means "with," so it can't be reduced to one factor, one organ. This I believe to be the source of the "non-thinkers'" belief in soul, eternal mind and so on: an immaterial force to explain the relationships between the material things, Debussy's "space between the notes." Yet since the soul seems to be explained as a material term, much like "ether" was posed as a material filling all of space, it's easily dismissible as a scientific concept for being unobservable, which is ironic since science itself is an immaterial force of explanation which has no observable effect on the processes it describes.

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Is science stored in one's brain? It's written in text, shared in discourse, extrapolated for ubiquitous technologies. This immateriality doesn't require some individualized biofield, and I doubt this to be the case with memory. A memory can be written down, shared in conversation, associated with a myriad of emotional triggers and physical correlates, extrapolated for one's work, relationships and state of mind: an external reality is shaped by, and in turn continuously influences, one's mental landscape.

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My memory is clearly dependent on my individualized biological experience, and everything indeed went through that brain, but it's the life I've created or gone toward and the surroundings I've chosen or found that color my thoughts of the past (that color is grey, lately). There may be a kind of neuronal "muscle memory" that reiterates the same associations and calls upon the same frames until new experiences mix things up.

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Mr. Mushrooms said:

Which is to say what?  That we have a word for brain that signifies a particular entity?  Indeed, we do.  Words and written significations are the substance, or effect, of the mind in the same way oil paints are the substance of a painting.  Without the mind they mean nothing as meaning is an integral part of the mind.

While the brain and its functions are analytically distinct, the process of the mind cannot be reduced to matter without falling into Idealism or self-refuting nominalism.  I think that's a heavy price to pay for allegiance to the materialist worldview.  If I understand you, you've just said that thoughts are material because they are material.  Words are significations and should not be conflated with thought.  They are sound or a visual image, nothing more.

If we are aware of something, there must be something to be aware of.  Yet, the awareness is a mental activity of the mind.  Without ideas being that by which we apprehend instead of that which we apprehend we are locked into an inner world where nothing can be experienced except for the mind or a universe that is only ideas but not material.  The fact that some novel neural activity obtains from some external stimuli does not negate this fact.  The brain and its associated functions are a necessary condition for the mind.  They cannot be a sufficient condition for the mind unless we are trapped inside our minds, i.e. solipsism, or the universe is only ideas and matter either doesn't exist or we cannot experience it.

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I don't like the word 'soul' because of its history.  In antiquity, a soul meant that which makes something alive, anima in Latin. Plants had souls, i.e. life.  The word changed to reflect certain theological ideas.  However, what of the spirit?  Spirit connotes that which is immaterial and that is what we're discussing--the immateriality of the mind.  Soul is never a material term though the intellect is something that cannot be observed.  As scientific concepts, like all conceptions or conceputalizations, are entities of the mind, the fact that the mind is, in itself, immaterial remains.

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A conflation of the signification with that which it signifies.  One cannot write a memory down, one can only write words which signify a memory.

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If a mind, and by that I mean that which is able to conceptualize, is merely matter, use the wires, what-have-you, to build one, i.e. AI.  I see they're still working on it.  When that happens, and not until, we are forced to conclude, if we don't want to give up our notions of reality, that the mind is immaterial.

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zannennagara said:

Yes! By no means am I subscribing to an exclusively material view - my goal here is a translation between the seemingly opposed material and immaterial views of mind. All materials labeled as such are clearly byproducts of mentation, yet there are similarities between mental experiences that lend themselves to such labeling, both within the experiences and fundamental to our human generation of them. The interaction of all these materials transcends an isolated material view - which may be a backwards way of saying it, since "materials" are a reduction of a gestalt system or experience.

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zannennagara said:

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I don't like the word 'soul' because of its history.  In antiquity, a soul meant that which makes something alive, anima in Latin. Plants had souls, i.e. life.  The word changed to reflect certain theological ideas.  However, what of the spirit?  Spirit connotes that which is immaterial and that is what we're discussing--the immateriality of the mind.  Soul is never a material term though the intellect is something that cannot be observed.  As scientific concepts, like all conceptions or conceputalizations, are entities of the mind, the fact that the mind is, in itself, immaterial remains.

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Because of the histories of "soul" and "spirit" the two words will never have a place in the dominant discourse of scientific materialism. Though what the words represent to many people is indeed in existence, it must be redefined so as to fit into this new language, at least if one wants to speak with those who use it. You've noted the important thing, which is that scientific concepts are themselves immaterial, so instead of words like "soul" to describe the lives of plants and animals we must use polysyllabic words ending with "ology" to say much the same thing. There are more ologies to deal with than one "soul," but this specific refinement of terminology comes with scientific classification.

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zannennagara said:

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A conflation of the signification with that which it signifies.  One cannot write a memory down, one can only write words which signify a memory.

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True, but reinforcement and recall of these memories (long-term memory) is shaped and aided by memory-influenced action and thought, actions like diarism which explicitly preserve the event or implicit preservation in neural pathways and life choices.

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zannennagara said:

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If a mind, and by that I mean that which is able to conceptualize, is merely matter, use the wires, what-have-you, to build one, i.e. AI.  I see they're still working on it.  When that happens, and not until, we are forced to conclude, if we don't want to give up our notions of reality, that the mind is immaterial.

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Even that will be immaterial, to credit the motivation and knowledge and programming and technical science behind and throughout it.

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Most non-thinkers agree that a brain damaged either through age or injury has a reduced function that directly affects the way an indivudal perceives and acts in the world.

Yay! The nutjobs and the rationalists are in accord.

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I don't know about all that.  I never heard of diarism, though I do know how to perserve memories.

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If wires and clockwork can be a mind, the brain could be synonymous with a mind.  At that point the whole argument falls apart.  What philosophical evidence can you provide to the contrary?

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zannennagara said:

By gestalt system I mean direct experience, that which precedes all descriptive words and concepts. This may be what we are calling the mental experience, but to refer to it as such a concept is to set it in opposition to the non-mental, creating a duality. For biologically functional purposes we have to focus on certain parts of the experience, and accordingly these parts are labeled and made "material," but these parts don't truly contradict their whole, the mental experience, and thus to frame the materials as separate from the "immaterial" whence they sprang is misdirected. Both material and immaterial are rough concepts stemming from the same source, a source which is beyond "matter and non-matter." As to us this source must be our mental experience, mind must precede either concept, so putting it into one category or the other is meaningless.

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zannennagara said:

I agree that it is perfectly fine to speak of mind in philosophical terms, and this is the philosophy board, but the golden rule applies to discourse as well - we have a situation comparable to "This is America, and we speak English here," where many people use a different language to describe the concepts. Materialists/scientists would do well to grasp the philosophical terminology here, but until they make the effort to reconcile differently-worded concepts (or as they do), philosophy would do well to assimilate scientific terms to show their parallels to philosophical concepts. Realistically, very few people outside of specialized academia relate to a philosophical discourse anymore, so it's probably prudent to learn the fashionable modes of description to preserve philosophy's love of questioning and debating reality and discourse itself.

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zannennagara said:

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I don't know about all that.  I never heard of diarism, though I do know how to perserve memories.

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These are hypotheses, really, so I don't know about all of it either. "Diarism" apparently is not in the dictionary, though "diarist" is (as is "journalism"), but I mean the practice of maintaining a diary to textually preserve memory - far more effective than "brain alone," although the brain knows the symbols and directs the writing and the reading; not only the textual descriptions are evoked but the associated memories of the feelings and thoughts at the time of writing them as well.

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zannennagara said:

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If wires and clockwork can be a mind, the brain could be synonymous with a mind.  At that point the whole argument falls apart.  What philosophical evidence can you provide to the contrary?

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The common argument that mind is synonymous with brain states is undermined by the inability of a "brain state" to encompass the vastness of the mental experience, so I look at the wires-and-clockwork example as rather a refutation of brain=mind. As you've been saying, a brain may be necessary rather than sufficient for mind, but if a brain is "just" a mechanical system, it's those other necessary interactive environments that animate mental experience, and then other mechanical systems interacting with environments may be considered "mind" as well, though of quite a different (somatically unimaginable?) shade than the experience shaped by our necessary brains.

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OrgoneConclusion said:

Thoroughly faulty analogy. Try again.

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Mr. Mushrooms said:

Not entirely misdirected if we wish to explain reality.  Otherwise, as I said, we are left with either solipsism or Idealism.  I would think a materialist would run from either possibility.  This seems to me to be suspiciously close to psychophysical isomorphism. While such a concept may aid in the material understanding of experience, it does nothing to solve the philosophical conundrum of Idealism or solipsism.

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One of the beauties of philosophical discourse, and here I am dismissing the highbrow, purportedly erudite nomenclature of philosophic academia, is that it uses common words to describe common entities.  True, the concepts may prove abstruse to those that specialize in scientific investigation, but that may be because they haven't sat down and thought deeply and without their internal bias that makes the materialist view so attractive.  I would suggest to anyone to pick up some Plato or Aristotle and think deeply about their ideas.  You'll find very few (actually none) specialized words.  Instead, you'll find deep thought.  So you see, a philosopher would have an additional burden that the materialist wouldn't have.  All philosophers such as myself are asking is that the materialist think deeply about the consequences of their worldview AND recognize the mess they're in with relationship to the mind.  The words are easy enough; it is the concepts that are abstruse, especially if one is clinging to matter.

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It's been a pleasure having this conversation.

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Kickle said:

OrgoneConclusion said:

Thoroughly faulty analogy. Try again.

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Care to explain?

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