But whatever that deeper process is it will be related to the physical, biological and chemical components of the brain because if you take away the brain there is no thought or consciousness.But if the brain itself is the product of a mind? If mind is fundamental, taking away the brain, which is 80% water, still leaves this creating conscious mind in place.
The bus stop analogy
by slimboyfat 29 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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PaddyTheBaddy
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LV101
ANNA MARINA - oh, thank you so much for the video and the great laugh/lololol. Oh my - I really needed it.
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redvip2000
The reason this possibility should be taken seriously is because we have no rational explanation for why or how a physical event can cause a feeling or a thought.
We might not have a rational explanation but we do have evidence that physical events do cause thoughts to arise. In fact, this has been measured in experiments that actually reliably document decisions between option A and B in the brain before the decision arises in a person's awareness.
In other words, the decision is documented before the person actually consciously decides.
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Diogenesister
Why would a bus pull over and stop when there is no one there?
To let people off?
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OnTheWayOut
All I know is that my brain hurts from following this thread.
Is it the thread that hurt my brain or is it my brain that caused itself to be hurt by not ceasing to follow this thread? Or maybe the hurt is just a chemical signal in my brain that is always there and I just notice it when we get stuck in silly logic circles. -
Anony Mous
we have no rational explanation for why or how a physical event can cause a feeling or a thought
That’s an unproven assertion and a wrong (easily falsifiable) one at that too. You’re also asking the rather unscientific why question.
Why: because the Universe exists and you ended up in the situation that caused it to happen by a chain of causal events. The why question does not make sense in our Universe, everything happens for a reason.
How: The causal event caused your senses to perceive something and neurons to fire, causing a chain of neurons to fire and when that waveform has been generated (and it is this becoming aware of and interacting with your thoughts is what we describe as intelligence or consciousness, this has been well established and has indeed been explored in ancient texts such as the Bible and other stories for as long as we have had stories), you have generated a thought.
This has been well known since the advent of EEG. How do we know this physical event is a thought and is preceded by real world events, well we can relatively accurately predict even with our current large and blunt instruments (we can’t measure down to the level of the neurons yet) what the thought is that you have, up to a few ms before your body can even create a response to the thought, given you have trained the system on a few wave patterns on clearly distinct thoughts. If thoughts weren’t causally related to external input, then we could not generate nor predict specific wave patterns, the whole science of psychophysics would’ve died in the 1950s.
I can even explain to you the way this is tested: you give people a random set of pictures, text or other inputs that are built to generate a thought, you just instruct people to think about each of them for a brief moment and give them a button to press when they have perceived a thought then give feedback on what they just thought about. You can then give, at a later date, far enough for them not to remember every one of them, random sets of similar and the same pictures, same test, have feedback. You do this a few times, you can start to detect patterns in EEG or MRI on similar trains of thought to the point you can predict before they even become fully aware of the thought what they will think about.
These kinds of unfounded assertions that we don’t understand the subject of consciousness or the brain are found all over the Internet, yet, they are generally created out of ignorance of the subject matter. Then they are often followed with some form of metaphysical explanation that you just have to take on faith alone. Even religiously inclined scientists will easily dismantle these sort of nonsense, if you had ever listened to say Jordan Peterson’s podcast, he is very religiously inclined yet you would’ve at least heard a bit about what I just said. This is one of the contributory reasons I personally left the JW, I took a job where I got closely involved with evolutionary neurobiology, neuroanatomy, psychology and psychophysics and most of the stuff asserted by the WTBTS was just plain BS. I came to understand that scientists have a darn good understanding of what’s going on and that all the assertions that life was just too complex for it to be evolved wasn’t true. Life is a simple set of parameters that when you let it run, it can give the appearance of complexity.
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slimboyfat
How do we know this physical event is a thought and is preceded by real world events, well we can relatively accurately predict even with our current large and blunt instruments (we can’t measure down to the level of the neurons yet) what the thought is that you have,
A physical event is not a thought, and that is the problem that you have not addressed. Physical events in the brain can and have been correlated with thoughts but that is not the same as showing that a physical event is a thought. It is not even clear what it means to say that a physical event is a thought. To say that a physical event and a thought are one and the same thing is a basic misunderstanding of what we are talking about. A musical score is not the same thing as the experience of music.
What is the difference between a physical event and a thought? They are two different categories of things. A physical event involves dimensions, energy, displacement: things that can be measured. A thought is a subjective experience. How does a physical event cause a subjective experience?
These kinds of unfounded assertions that we don’t understand the subject of consciousness or the brain are found all over the Internet, yet, they are generally created out of ignorance of the subject matter.
The problem of consciousness is central to philosophy of mind research and there is no agreed upon resolution to the problem. If your engagement with the topic is “unfounded assertions” all over the Internet then it suggests you’ve not read very deeply on the topic.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
As you can see from this academic summary of the topic, the “why” question consciousness is taken seriously in theory of mind research.
David Chalmers gives a succinct explanation of the problem of consciousness here.
If you are convinced there are philosophers or scientists who have solved the problem of consciousness then I’d be interested to have a look. I have already read Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained which other scholars have pointed out, rather than explaining consciousness, denies its existence. That may be one way of “solving” the problem of consciousness, but it is widely regarded as unsatisfactory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
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PaddyTheBaddy
How: The causal event caused your senses to perceive something and neurons to fire, causing a chain of neurons to fire and when that waveform has been generated (and it is this becoming aware of and interacting with your thoughts is what we describe as intelligence or consciousness, this has been well established and has indeed been explored in ancient texts such as the Bible and other stories for as long as we have had stories), you have generated a thought.
This is what is being challenged by metaphysical idealism. Materialism claims brain activity causes thoughts, whereas metaphysical idealism claims mental processes are reflected in brain activity but not caused by it. Brain activity may be simply a physical representation or image of our subjective mental experience.
If materialism's account is correct, then our personal subjective experiences are no more than the result of objective physical processes in our brain. Brain activity would precede the development of a thought. So in other words you didn't produce the thought, you just became aware of it, after material processes generated both the thought and your awareness of it.
If thoughts are always the pure product of physical activity in the brain, then "you" can never be truly held accountable for your actions, as they were dictated to you by your brain. In fact the “you" part is just an illusion, a trick of your brain which leads you to believe there is more to "you" than there actually is in reality. You are a figment of your brains imagination. This doesn't mean materialism’s view is wrong, it's just interesting to follow this path to its logical conclusion.
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Anony Mous
@paddy: and that is exactly what I was saying. There is no non-materialist viewpoint in science. You have a testable hypothesis proven or disproven by observation or you don’t. What we experience as a thought is well understood in the neurosciences and you can indeed observe that people have brain activity before they become aware of the thought. As Lawrence Krauss says: the why question is really a how question.
What slimboyfat and some others theorize is that really, this doesn’t prove anything, because you could be wrong. Well, that’s true, but then come with a testable hypothesis that improves on the current understanding and predictions and observations we can make. Just because we could be wrong does not mean something metaphysical is happening, we know Newtons laws are wrong, but they are still useful enough to fly to the moon, there is a lot to learn about thoughts and consciousness but that doesn’t mean it is not something that exists outside the physical processes we know off or somewhere outside our brain as some would like it to be.
I think we all know what a thought is, it is the inner monologue going on in our head that parses and interprets and attempts to predict the future based on the information we receive from our senses. The thoughts we have are directly related to our current observations as well as historical information (memories) we have stored, in whatever abstract method we do that. The reason we know that in psychology is that we can put ourselves in the other persons shoes (figuratively) and based on the prior information we know about that person, we can deduce their thoughts, we also know most people think the same way about the same things, so even though we abstract things in our own way, as a group, we can quite accurately predict thoughts and actions based on very little information (we just need to know gender, age group and sociological status) which is what advertisers do on a daily basis.
Chalmers, quoted above is a dualist. He believes that the “simple” consciousness is easily explainable by physical processes, whereas the more complex questions can only be explained by supernatural (although he doesn’t say as much, he just says that some things can’t be reduced to natural explanations, which is basically the same as admitting supernatural intervention). In my opinion that’s just the god of the gaps argument, but I’m sure those people wouldn’t admit that.
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PaddyTheBaddy
What we experience as a thought is well understood in the neurosciences and you can indeed observe
that people have brain activity before they become aware of the thought.
Just on this point, metaphysical idealism proposes that the reason there is brain activity before we become conscious of our thoughts, is because the subconscious mind may be activated first. The operation of the subconscious mind is then seen via brain activity.
Just because we could be wrong does not mean something metaphysical is happening, we know Newtons laws are wrong, but they are still useful enough to fly to the moon, there is a lot to learn about thoughts and consciousness but that doesn’t mean it is not something that exists outside the physical processes we know off or somewhere outside our brain as some would like it to be.
The mystery about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff which produces consciousness (if true?) is like the question Stephen Hawking’s asked about the nature of the mathematical equations which describe the universe. What breathes fire into these equations in order to produce a universe for them to describe? What breathes fire into physical reality in order to produce consciousness?
The physical processes producing brain activity could be likened to a roller coaster car guided by the tracks it sits on. Something about the nature of reality caused the car to experience the ride.