1,372 thoughts on “Why does the soul need the brain?”

1. keiths:
   Byers,

   And in the scientific literature there are scores of studies describing the problems — including problems with thinking — caused by damage to the brain.

   You are hopelessly unfamiliar with the evidence, Robert.

   they are wrong. they interpretate its the brain. Yet its just the memory and its connections to the body.
   Yes they imagine we have a brain where the thinking goes on. without a soul also.
   Yet in truth, i say, there is no brain involved. its just soul and memory machine.
   the ‘brain’ is a trivial mass of parts. THE BRAIN they mean as a place of human/animal thought. This is wrong.
   thats why all thinking problems are just memory problems. Any brain mass issue only matters if it interferes with the memory/mind connection to the body.
   So removal/missing parts of the mass of the brain is irrelevant.

2. fifthmonarchyman: In 1996 the physical instantiation of the Cleveland Browns became the Baltimore Ravens.

   Yet the genuine team still existed in the hearts of the community until it was physically “resurrected” in 1999.

   Now each year the genuine “resurrected” Cleveland Browns play the phony “physical instantiation” that is not the Cleveland Browns.

   check it out
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Browns_relocation_controversy

   peace

   Actually, the hearts of the community contained no trace of the former team. No memories of them, no feelings for them. Those hearts were simply pumping blood.

   Facile, poetic language has its place, but not when you are arguing existential questions.

3. fifth,

   1) I have no idea what keiths has quoted. I’ve chosen to ignore him because he is willing to lie to to win an argument.

   You’re not fooling anyone, fifth. We’ve been over this before:

   keiths
   March 29, 2018 at 1:30 am

   fifth,

   In short you lied for months for no other reason than to obtain an unfair debating advantage and apparently you are still unwilling to admit that transgression.

   Parody is not lying, and I don’t need an unfair advantage. You make mistakes right and left. All I have to do is observe them and point them out. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

   Think about how well this has worked out for me:

   1. I still get to refute your arguments. The fact that you have me on Ignore hampers you from responding to me, but not vice-versa.

   2. Readers see you failing to respond, and they know why. You’re not impressing anyone by hiding behind your Ignore button and making excuses.

   3. Readers can see how little faith you actually have in Jesus. If you trusted him to help you, you’d be confronting my arguments instead of hiding from them. If you trusted him to reveal things at the crucial moments, you’d be bringing the fight to me instead of running away. Ironically, it’s one of the few things we seem to agree on: You’re on your own in these debates. Jesus doesn’t give you the help you need.

   (I have an obvious explanation for that: He’s been dead for 2000 years, and dead people aren’t very good at responding to requests for help. What’s your explanation?)

4. Being a Christian — and particularly a fundamentalist — puts you in a position of weakness. So instead of standing your ground, you run.

   Meanwhile, my argument remains unchallenged.

5. keiths:
   Bruce,

   But that didn’t stop you from applying the label to J-Mac in a subsequent comment.Can’t say that I blame you.If the shoe fits…

   I was trying to apply the label “incomprehensible” only to a relation between my abilities and J-Mac’s comments. I believe that means I am nowhere near breaking any TSZ rules.
   Some may go further and apply the term directly to his comments, or even to J-Mac himself, but I have not intentionally done so.

6. llanitedave: Actually, the hearts of the community contained no trace of the former team. No memories of them, no feelings for them. Those hearts were simply pumping blood.

   Facile, poetic language has its place, but not when you are arguing existential questions.

   touche

   peace

7. newton: The soul is a artificial, intangible entity?

   leave it to a materialist to equate immaterial with the artificial and intangible.

   The rest of us have no problem understanding that teams and corporations and meadows and rain-showers actually exist. Though they may be difficult to touch.

   newton: As for meadow ,a piece of grassland is pretty material as are showers. You seem to be tilting with windmills.

   A meadow becomes a meadow when it’s recognized as such by persons before that it’s nothing but a amorphous mass of soil with plants. It could just as easily be a field or a prairie or a savanna or a lawn.

   Likewise a rain-shower exists in minds. it’s boundaries are not physical but mental.

   At some point a drop becomes a sprinkle later a sprinkle becomes a shower and at some point a shower becomes a storm and at some point a storm becomes a flood.

   All depending on impressions of the mind(s) who experience it.

   peace

8. fifthmonarchyman: I would say the mind and the soul are roughly synonymous. […]

   In your view what are the differences between a mind and a soul??

   I do not have a sophisticated understanding of the religious concept of the soul. My simpleminded view is that the soul refers to an entity that exists outside of space and time but can also be identified with an existing person for some span of spacetime. Possibly different people at different times, depending on your religion.

   I see the mind as being realized by the brain and so ceasing to exist when the brain is no longer able to provide that realization. (eg when it dies or when it is in non-recoverable vegetative state).

   If the mind is realized by the brain and gets all its properties and causal powers via that realization, then one can argue that the mind has no properties or causal powers on its own and so can be reduced to and replaced by the brain. So minds do not exist in that viewpoint. Or one can argue that instead both exist but still be a physicalist of the non-reductive variety. Which position is correct is a contentious issue in philosophy of mind.

   Roughly speaking, I understand that in at least some of your posts you are making an analogous point about teams and players — that is you reduce a team’s properties and abilities to those of their players and coach. I understand KN as taking the non-reductive approach to realism: that is, both teams and players exist.

   ETA: So when you say that the soul and mind are “roughly synonymous”, I am contused since I think of the two are completely different concepts with only the mind being realized by the brain.

9. Kantian Naturalist:

   I haven’t worked out all the necessary details, but let me put this way: if all real patterns are dynamical processes and stances are embodied social practices of engaging with them,

   I remain confused about what an embodied social stance is. I’ve only looked at the Kukla paper you suggested some time ago.

   My problem, I suspect, is that intellectually I came from the world of programming. To understand philosophy of mind, I have had to change my conceptual system from software running on the brain to something more attuned with modern ideas of representation and action with an embodied mind.

   But the concept of “embodied social stances” is still too far from where I started for me to have a clear idea of what is meant.

   But I’ll keep punchin’ away at it….

10. KN: … things that exist …

    A bit late, but Im bemused by your use of ‘exist’.

    I don’t see that a number, for eg, ‘exists’ in any meaningful sense, but I suppose you can use it if you like.

11. Here are some thoughts that Rudolf Steiner gave about the relationship between the soul and the body. (I would suggest reading the whole talk and the other two talks which follow on from it)

    We have to show above all which relation between soul and body the unbiased psychologist has to assume; for it seems to be a result of modern natural sciences that one should no longer speak of the soul as one did it for thousands of years before our time. The physical research which pressed its stamp onto the 19th century and its mental development explained again and again that a science of the soul in the old sense of the word — as for example that of Goethe and partially of Aristotle — is not compatible with its views and is not tenable, therefore. You can take manuals about psychology or The Riddles of the World by Haeckel. You will find everywhere that the dogmatic prejudices exist and that one has the opinion that the old points of view under which one tried to approach the soul are overcome. Nobody can revere Haeckel — I say this for the scientists and the admirers of Ernst Haeckel — as a great man of science more than I myself. But great human beings also have big shortcomings, and thus it may be my task to test a prejudice of our time quite impartially.

    What is said to us from this side? One says to us: what you called soul disappeared under our hands. We naturalists have shown that any sensation, everything that develops as conceptual life, any thinking, any willing, any feeling that everything is tied to particular organs of our brain and our nervous system. Natural sciences of the 19th century showed, one says, that certain parts of our cerebral cortex unless they are completely intact make it impossible to us to accomplish certain mental manifestations. From that one concludes that in these parts of our brain the mental manifestations are located that they are dependent, as one says, on these parts of our brain. One has expressed this drastically saying: a certain point of the brain is the centre of speech, another part of this soul activity, another part of another activity, so that one can tear down the soul bit by bit.

    One has shown that the illness of particular cerebral parts is connected with the loss of particular soul abilities at the same time. What one imagined as soul since millennia, no naturalist can find this; this is a concept with which the naturalist cannot do anything. We find the body and its functions, but nowhere a soul. The great moralist of Darwinism, Bartholomäus Carneri who has written an ethics of Darwinism expressed his conviction clearly as it can never be given more clearly by these circles of the naturalists. He says: we take a clock. The pointers advance, the clockwork is in movement. All that happens because of the mechanism which is before us. As we have in that which the clock accomplishes a manifestation of the clock mechanism, in the same way we have in that which the human being feels, thinks and wills a manifestation of the whole nervous mechanism before us.

    Just as little one can assume that a small soul-being is in the clock which moves the cog wheels, the pointers, just as little we can suppose that a soul exists outside the organism which causes thinking, feeling and willing. — This is the confession of a naturalist in mental respect; it is that which the naturalists have made the basis of a new faith, such a pure naturalistic religion. The naturalist believes that he is forced to this confession by the results of science and he believes that he is allowed to regard everybody as a childish mind who does not conclude this way under the influence of science. Bartholomäus Carneri showed it without any whitewash. As long as the human beings were children, they have spoken like Aristotle; because they have grown up now and understand science, they must leave the childish views. The view of the naturalists, which regards the human being as nothing else than a mechanism, corresponds to the metaphor of the clock. Drastically expressed, this view is considered as the only one which is worthy of the present. It is shown in such a way that the scientific discoveries of the age force us to these confessions.

    However, we have to ask ourselves: did the natural sciences, the precise investigation of our nervous system, the precise investigation of our organs and their functions really force us to this view? No, because in the 18th century everything that one gives as something scientific and authoritative today was still in the germ. There was nothing of modern psychology, nothing of the discoveries of the great Johannes Müller and his school, nothing of the discoveries which the naturalists made in the 19th century.

    At that time, in the 18th century, these views were expressed in the most radical way in the French Enlightenment which could not rely on natural sciences, the words sounded for the first time: the human being is a machine. — A book by Holbach comes from this time, entitled: Système de la nature, about which Goethe said that he felt rejected by its superficiality and triviality. This as proof of the fact that this view existed before the modern natural sciences. One is allowed to say that on the contrary the materialism of the 18th century hovered over the minds of the 19th century and that the materialistic creed was setting the tone for the way of thinking which one then brought into the natural sciences. That with regard to the historical truth. If it were not in such a way, one would have to call the view a childish one which the modern natural sciences has, namely that one cannot speak of the soul in the old sense because one can tear down the soul in the same way as one can tear down the brain.

    What did one gain especially with this view? No soul-researcher who tries to recognise the soul according to Aristotle, according to the old Greeks, or — we say in spite of all contradiction which approach from some sides — according to the Christian Middle Ages can take offence of the truths of modern natural sciences. Every reasonable soul-researcher agrees to that which the natural sciences say about the nervous system and the brain as the mediators of our soul functions. He is not surprised that one can no longer speak if a certain part of the brain falls ill. The old researcher is no longer surprised with that like with the fact that he can no longer think after he has been killed.

    Modern science does nothing else than to determine in detail what the human beings have already understood on the whole. Just as the human being knows that he cannot speak without certain cerebral parts, cannot form ideas, it would be a proof that he has no soul if he could be killed. Also the Vedantists, also Plato and others are clear to themselves about the fact that the soul activity of the human being stops if a big fieldstone falls on his head and smashes him. The old psychology did not teach anything different. We can be aware of that. We can accept the whole natural sciences and form psychology differently. During former centuries one realised that the way which the natural sciences took does not lead to the knowledge of the soul and can also not be taken, hence, to its disproof.

    If those who try to disprove the old psychology from the standpoint of science were well-versed in former lines of thought, if people were not yet so prejudiced in the external life, then they could realise that they tilt at windmills like once Don Quixote to combat psychology in this scientific sense.

    This whole fight is already shown in a conversation which you find in the Buddhist literature, in a conversation which does not belong to the sermons of Buddha himself which was written down only some years before Christ. Somebody who investigates the conversation sees that it concerns the oldest real views of Buddhism which find expression in the discussion of the King Milinda equipped with Greek wisdom and dialectic with the Buddhist sage Nagasena. This king steps to the Indian sage and asks: who are you? — The sage Nagasena answers: one calls me Nagasena. But this is only a name. No subject, no personality is contained in it. — How? King Milinda said who held the Greek dialectic and the whole ability and power of Greek thinking in himself — listen to me who you have come along, the sage states that nothing is behind the name Nagasena. What is then that which stands there before me? Are your hands, your legs Nagasena? No. Is your sensations, feelings and ideas Nagasena? No, all this is not Nagasena. Then the connection of that is Nagasena. But, because he states now that everything is not Nagasena that only a name is there which holds together everything, who and what is Nagasena, actually? Is that nothing which is behind the brain, behind the organs, behind the body, behind the feelings and ideas? Is that nothing who does others a few favours? Is somebody nothing who does the good and the bad? Is somebody nothing who strives for holiness? Is nothing behind that all but the sheer name? — There Nagasena answered using another metaphor: how have you come, great king, on foot or carriage? — The king answered: on carriage. — Now, explain the carriage to me. Is the shaft your carriage? Are the wheels your carriage? Is the carriage box your carriage? — No, answers the king. — What is then your carriage? It is a name which refers only to the connection of the different parts.

    What did the sage Nagasena want to say who grew up in Buddhism? — O king, you who have gained an immense ability in Greece, in the Greek philosophy you must understand that you come to anything else than to a name if you consider the parts of the carriage in their connection as little as if you hold together the parts of the human being.

    Take this ancient teaching which can be traced back to the oldest times of the Buddhist world view and ask yourselves what is said in it? Nothing else than that the way of recognising the soul by looking at the external organs or at the interplay of ideas is a wrong track. By the way, the great anatomist Metchnikoff reckoned that the ideas are a milliard. In terms of this correct saying of the sage Nagasena we cannot find the soul that way. This is a wrong way. One never tried to approach the soul that way in the times in which one knew on which way one has to find the soul and to study it. It was a historical necessity that the fine, intimate ways on which still the sages of the Christian Middle Ages looked for the soul receded a little bit into the background when our natural sciences started to take up the external world.

    I apologise for such a long quote but I wanted to provide enough to give an understanding of what he was saying.

    In order to understand the brain we have to follow the ways of natural science and study it as part of the external world. In order to study and understand the soul we have to turn in the opposite direction and look within.

12. newton: In your view does mater affect the immaterial as well as the reverse?

    I take it then you’re not up to responding to my challenge:

    When you can tell me how one object makes another move towards it (what we call gravity) without resorting to a descriptive model of the observed behavior itself, you’ll have a point of distinction between matter magically affecting matter and the immaterial magically affecting matter.

    You still talk as if there is a “material” world, as if “matter” exists, when we know this is not true from modern physics. “Matter” is an ancient conceptualization based on rudimentary sensory perceptions, like the idea that the sun is the thing moving when it rises in the east and sets in the west. We know better now. “Physical experience” is not matter-based because there’s no such thing as “matter”. There is no “matter” for the immaterial to interact with; there are only information potentials, so to speak.

    There is no “material world” outside of our experiential, mental construct. Think of it as a kind of highly consistent and enduring semi-consensual dream.

13. William J. Murray: take it then you’re not up to responding to my challenge:

    When you can tell me how one object makes another move towards it (what we call gravity) without resorting to a descriptive model of the observed behavior itself, you’ll have a point of distinction between matter magically affecting matter and the immaterial magically affecting matter.

    I am fine with a descriptive model was my answer, what is the descriptive model of immaterial affecting the material?

14. William J. Murray: I take it then you’re not up to responding to my challenge:

    You still talk as if there is a “material” world, as if “matter” exists, when we know this is not true from modern physics

    At some level there is the difference between hitting your thumb with a “material” hammer and the concept of a hammer. There may not be a material world but there are perceived differences in the non material world at least at the scale we as humans exist.

    .“Matter” is an ancient conceptualization based on rudimentary sensory perceptions, like the idea that the sun is the thing moving when it rises in the east and sets in the west.

    Ok

    We know better now.“Physical experience” is not matter-based because there’s no such thing as “matter”.There is no “matter” for the immaterial to interact with; there are only information potentials, so to speak.

    Could you expand on the nature of information potentials?

    What is the difference then between libertarian free will and the biologicals that you drew earlier. Does a biological automaton make sense without existence of biology or automatons?

    There is no “material world” outside of our experiential, mental construct.Think of it as a kind of highly consistent and enduring semi-consensual dream.B

    I understand that position yet most who hold it still pay rent, eat food, and don’t walk in front of a mental construct of a car. ,

    How would you know that there is no material world outside if you are trapped within an experimental mental contruct?

    Consensual with whom?

15. graham2: A bit late, but Im bemused by your use of ‘exist’.

    I don’t see that a number, for eg, ‘exists’ in any meaningful sense, but I suppose you can use it if you like.

    For sure, “exists” is a tricky notion that’s much abused because it can be used in a variety of senses.

    To be clear about my views: I’m a nominalist and a process ontologist. I think that only concrete particulars exist and that dynamical processes are our best way of understanding what concrete particulars are. To a Platonist it will look as if I’m denying that numbers exist, because she will insist on conceptualizing numbers as real universals.

    At the same time, it’s certainly true that we can make true and false statements in mathematics, and truth-value has a close relationship with existence-talk. “There are no flying sauropods” means “flying sauropods don’t exist” means “it is false that there are flying sauropods”, and we can make the same equivalences work in mathematical discourse if we were so inclined. (“It is false that any formal language sufficiently rich to express arithmetic is complete” means “there does not exist any formal language both complete and sufficiently rich to express arithmetic”, etc.)

    So where does this leave us? I think there’s something really quite profound in the Buddhist “Two Truths” doctrine that distinguishes between conventional reality and ultimate reality. And while I don’t think that fundamental physics is the best or only guide to ultimate reality, I do think that the sciences generally are our best guide to ultimate reality, because scientific practices, when well-ordered (i.e. not corrupted by money or power) are the best way we’ve figured out about how to let the world have a vote in what we say about it.

16. CharlieM: it seems to be a result of modern natural sciences that one should no longer speak of the soul as one did it for thousands of years before our time. The physical research which pressed its stamp onto the 19th century and its mental development explained again and again that a science of the soul in the old sense of the word — as for example that of Goethe and partially of Aristotle — is not compatible with its views and is not tenable, therefore. You can take manuals about psychology or The Riddles of the World by Haeckel. You will find everywhere that the dogmatic prejudices exist and that one has the opinion that the old points of view under which one tried to approach the soul are overcome. Nobody can revere Haeckel — I say this for the scientists and the admirers of Ernst Haeckel — as a great man of science more than I myself. But great human beings also have big shortcomings, and thus it may be my task to test a prejudice of our time quite impartially.

    His attitude toward Haeckel should be precisely the attitude you take toward Steiner today. This issue has been discussed in considerably greater depth over the last couple of generations starting with such distinguished philosophers as Frege, Quine, and Kripke. You could start by googling “Hesperus-Phosphorus identity problem” and then move on to “Putnam water H2O”

    Your love for this second-rate huckster is kind of sweet, but also silly.

17. newton: I understand that position yet most who hold it still pay rent, eat food, and don’t walk in front of a mental construct of a car. ,

    That seems right. Considered strictly within the standpoint of lived experience and doing a bit of crude phenomenology, most of us have no difficulty distinguishing between hallucination and perception, and people who do have difficulty distinguishing between them are regarded as mentally ill.

    In a way that’s rarely appreciated, a lot of philosophical questions come down to sanity. A very close reading of the first paragraphs of Descartes’s First Meditation show that’s really concerned with “how do I know that I’m not crazy? How can I know whether or not I’m sane?” That’s the preliminary question that he uses to motivate skepticism regarding the reliability of the senses.

    I don’t think we have any better resolution of this quandary than dialogue or conversation: if you can talk with another person about your respective experiences of more or less stable/enduring objects, then you have enough of a grasp of the appearance/reality distinction for all practical purposes.

18. newton: I am fine with a descriptive model was my answer, what is the descriptive model of immaterial affecting the material?

    Okay, so you admit you cannot provide a “how”; you can only provide descriptive models of the behavior. There are plenty of descriptive models of the the immaterial affecting the material (using those terms and perspectives arguendo), one being consciousness collapsing the quantum potential into specific actualities, as demonstrated and measured by various forms of the two-slit experiments.

    However, I personally reject that framing, because physics shows that the idea that “matter” exists is entirely erroneous. No such thing as “matter” actually exists.

19. walto, to CharlieM:

    this second-rate huckster

    How dare you criticize the Dear Leader!

20. William,

    However, I personally reject that framing, because physics shows that the idea that “matter” exists is entirely erroneous.

    Um, no. Please read less woo and more science.

21. newton: At some level there is the difference between hitting your thumb with a “material” hammer and the concept of a hammer. There may not be a material world but there are perceived differences in the non material world at least at the scale we as humans exist.

    Insisting there is a difference based on rudimentary senses doesn’t carry the conversation forward. You could also insist that you actually see the sun move through the sky. I could also counter with the point that because I can sense hurting myself with a hammer in a dream, that means the things in the dream made of “matter”. There is no material world. Physics has proven this beyond reasonable doubt.

    Could you expand on the nature of information potentials?

    The number of possible observable, experiential configurations of the information present in the local quantum field (and entangled non-local aspects), related to the capacity of the observer to successfully process particular potentials. IOW, since it depends on how one sets up the observational experiment, and it depends on which locations the observer can determine the path of a photon (for example) from, the observer can only collapse the specific locations of the photon accordingly. So, what we see as specific points of realized “matter” depends both on the potential locations overall, the entanglement factors, and the nature of the observation. I would suspect there is an enormous amount of plasticity available as far as what two separate observers are able to derive from this interaction in terms of what they experience.

    What is the difference then between libertarian free will and the biologicals that you drew earlier. Does a biological automaton make sense without existence ofbiology or automatons?

    What I refer to as “biological automatons” are terms applied in the “material world” framework. They would be “informational automatons” in the “information” framework, much like the informational automaton NPCs in a computer game.

    I understand that position yet most who hold it still pay rent, eat food, and don’t walk in front of a mental construct of a car. ,

    Think of the movie “the matrix”. Everyone in the matrix did all those things. You may dream of doing any of those things. That has zero bearing on whether or not what we experience as a material world is actually a material world. It is not. Physics has long since prove it is not.

    How would you know that there is no material world outside if you are trapped within an experimental mental contruct?

    I didn’t say we were “trapped”. I guess we can hypothesize that a “material world” actually exists, somewhere. My statements are about the experiential world that physicists have been studying and have gathered incontrovertible evidence about. This is not a “material world”. We would have no idea what “matter” would be, since we have apparently never seen it or interacted with it. We only know what we have called “matter” in a mental/informational construct.

    So, trying to discuss “matter” would be like making up a word and asking about it. It has no point of reference to even be able to discuss it.

    Consensual with whom?

    With others.

22. Kantian Naturalist: That seems right. Considered strictly within the standpoint of lived experience and doing a bit of crude phenomenology, most of us have no difficulty distinguishing between hallucination and perception, and people who do have difficulty distinguishing between them are regarded as mentally ill.

    Except we’re not talking about “distinguishing between hallucination and perception”, and we are most definitely speaking about the very nature of “lived experience”, not about what it seems to be within that lived experience.

    Physics has proven beyond any meaningful doubt that we are not living in a world of “matter”, so obviously our “lived experience” of living in a world of matter and material interactions is false according to science, just like the idea that we are living on a flat Earth, or the idea that the sun revolves around the Earth, were proven false, even though those views were considered obvious according to “lived experience”.

    I don’t think we have any better resolution of this quandary than dialogue or conversation: if you can talk with another person about your respective experiences of more or less stable/enduring objects, then you have enough of a grasp of the appearance/reality distinction for all practical purposes.

    I don’t really understand your point. It sounds to me that you are saying that as long as we can talk about and mutually understand and organize the practical operation of our lives under the view that the Earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it, there’s no reason to talk about, explore or investigate the validity of those assumptions?

23. keiths has no soul. Why does he need a brain?

24. There is no material world. Physics has proven this beyond reasonable doubt.

    False. Less woo and more science, please, William.

25. fifthmonarchyman: leave it to a materialist to equate immaterial with the artificial and intangible.

    You equated it when you wrote “ It works exactly the same way with the immaterial soul.”

    We were discussing the immaterial aspect of incorporation and the creation of an artificial,intangible, entities . It is your analogy Fifth. How are you so sure the soul is not an artificial contruct? It would still be immaterial. Exactly the same way as the Cavs.

    The rest of us have no problem understanding that teams and corporations and meadows and rain-showers actually exist. Though they may be difficult to touch.

    If you had been reading my responses you would know neither do I. All those things are descriptive of a physical manifestation. Does the description of a rain shower get you wet, or is it the physical manifestation? Since I am not a materialist , I have no problem with calling that description immaterial.

    I have already conceded the physical world can interact with the immaterial.

    But nothing so far has addressed my question, how does the immaterial interact with the material? William’s libertarian Free Will cause the hand to lift?

    A meadow becomes a meadow when it’s recognized as such by persons before that it’s nothing but a amorphous mass of soil with plants

    I gave you the definition already, it is a type of terrain.

    .

    It could just as easily be a field or a prairie or a savanna or a lawn.

    Sure, do of those different names change the physical manifestation? You might argue that since those concepts have different subjective meaning our reactions are different .depending on what we call something. Language as a mechanism.

    Likewise a rain-shower exists in minds. it’s boundaries are not physical but mental.

    An intangible concept. How does the concept interact with the physical world?Does that concept keep plants alive?

    At some point a drop becomes a sprinkle later a sprinkle becomes a shower and at some point a shower becomes a storm and at some point a storm becomes a flood.

    All those things are descriptions of an aspect physical manifestation. Does calling a shower a flood cause something to happen ? How does it?

    All depending on impressions of the mind(s) who experience it.

    And those impressions are immaterial or material?

    peace

26. J-Mac: Tr BruceS can grasp the nature of the chasm separating GR and QM…

    Maybe you should check the definition of humor.

    Just to be crystal clear, there are many theories bringing together QM and GR, (eg String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity) but all have issues. Currently, we do not have the technology to do any experiments to help us decide definitively, at least for any of experiments we can think of that might do so.

    Standard QM does not address gravity, so it is only 100% reliable in the sense that it does not make any wrong predictions about gravity. But it does not make any correct ones either.

27. fifthmonarchyman: Better yet assume that the mind is materiel and b1 and b2 are exactly similar and the share exactly similar memories.

    Are there two persons or just one?

    The point of the thought experiment is to test substance dualism. So assuming minds are physical means one is not talking about the same philosophical thought experiment.

    If we assume physicalist monism, then minds supervene on brains. There are two brains and so two human animals.

    Whether there are two persons is a philosophical question about personal identity. I’ve already given my thoughts on that in the thread on quantum immortality.

28. walto: His attitude toward Haeckel should be precisely the attitude you take toward Steiner today. This issue has been discussed in considerably greater depth over the last couple of generations starting with such distinguished philosophers as Frege, Quine, and Kripke. You could start by googling “Hesperus-Phosphorus identity problem” and then move on to “Putnam water H2O”

    I don’t entirely disagree, since the work by analytic philosophers on the semantic of reference and meaning has been very helpful.

    But it’s just as important to insist that we actually do know something about how brains work; there’s a lot of important work in cognitive neuroscience that’s been done by people like George Miller, Michael Gazzinga, Ulric Neisser, Stephen Kosslyn, Antonio Damasio, and thousands of others. The philosophy of cognitive neuroscience has been developed by people like Paul and Patricia Churchland, Jerry Fodor, Andy Clark, Kathleen Akins, Karen Neander, and hundreds of others.

    So we actually have empirically well grounded reasons for dismissing Haeckel and Steiner, in addition to arguments for avoiding their confusions about sense and reference.

29. Kantian Naturalist,

    Definitely. I just want to get Charlie started with stuff from 100 years ago. I didn’t mean to suggest he should stop there!

    I do think the first lesson he needs to learn is that Joe may be the man with the mustache without him realizing it. That’s necessary knowledge for getting anywhere with philosophy of mind. But of course it’s hardly sufficient.

30. BruceS: I do not have a sophisticated understanding of the religious concept of the soul. My simpleminded view is that the soul refers to an entity that exists outside of space and time but can also be identified with an existing person for some span of spacetime. Possibly different people at different times, depending on your religion.

    I can’t speak for religion in general but the folks I hang with generally think of the soul as more or less synonymous with the self.

    In addition they tend to think we have a body and brain but not that we are a body and brain.

    That seems to me to be the common sense default understanding of the situation IMO. It’s the understanding you get from Christian scripture as well in my opinion.

    I think that everyone materialist or otherwise gets into trouble when we allow our worldview to intrude on that simple common sense understanding.

    BruceS: I see the mind as being realized by the brain and so ceasing to exist when the brain is no longer able to provide that realization. (eg when it dies or when it is in non-recoverable vegetative state).

    I understand that position as far as it goes. however I see no reason to say that a person’s (mind/soul/self) must be realized in the particular body it’s currently “realized” in.

    I think that it’s theoretically possible that I could exist with another body or have my consciousness downloaded into a computer for instance.

    Do you disagree??

    Going further out on a speculative limb I would say that a mind could in theory exist within another sufficiently capable mind/soul/self so that I could exist with out a body in the mind of God for a time at least.

    I’m not saying that is what happens. Just speculating.

    What would prevent this sort of thing in your worldview?

    peace

31. Kantian Naturalist,

    This could be a great drinking game. Take a swig every time there is a name dropped.

    😉

    peace

32. BruceS: The point of the thought experiment is to test substance dualism. So assuming minds are physical means one is not talking about the same philosophical thought experiment.

    Actually I think the assumption shows the deficiency of the thought experiment.

    If imagining two identical bodies does not work for substance dualism or physicalist monism then there is something wrong with the experiment.

    I think the individualist properties thingy is a hint of where the solution lies.

    BruceS: Whether there are two persons is a philosophical question about personal identity.

    personal identity and the soul are concepts that are joined at the hip.

    peace

33. Bruce:

    The point of the thought experiment is to test substance dualism. So assuming minds are physical means one is not talking about the same philosophical thought experiment.

    fifth:

    Actually I think the assumption shows the deficiency of the thought experiment.

    If imagining two identical bodies does not work for substance dualism or physicalist monism then there is something wrong with the experiment.

    It does work, for both. What doesn’t work, as Bruce notes, is assuming physicalism in a thought experiment intended to test substance dualism.

    Damn, fifth. Right over your head.

34. fifth:

    I think that everyone materialist or otherwise gets into trouble when we allow our worldview to intrude on that simple common sense understanding.

    Says a guy who believes in the Trinity.

35. keiths:
    fifth:

    Says a guy who believes in the Trinity.

    Well, is it really so different from wynken, blynken and nod? Or Snap Crackle and Pop? I mean, we’ve all managed to come to terms with those a long time ago.

36. I bet keiths’ mom believes in the Trinity. I wonder if he gives her shit about it.

37. walto,

    That’s fair enough — though sometimes I think that philosophy of mind went down a problematic path when it took philosophy of language and analytic metaphysics too seriously. I prefer to take the cognitive sciences and phenomenology as my points of departure for getting into this stuff. I also think that the recent work in complex dynamical system is really key for getting away from a strictly mechanistic account of causality. I’m reading Juarrero’s Dynamics in Action now and it’s eye-opening. But I also think that dynamical systems theory in cognition has embraced a deeply problematic anti-representationalism. Part of my current work is about how to think about representations as dynamic systems by following up on Sellars’s rather opaque hints about “picturing.”

38. walto: Well, is it really so different from wynken, blynken and nod? Or Snap Crackle and Pop? I mean, we’ve all managed to come to terms with those a long time ago.

    It’s comments like this that let me know you don’t have a clue about what the concept of the Trinity is describing.

    That sort of complete ignorance makes your rejection of it almost understandable. 😉

    peace

39. fifthmonarchyman: Actually I think the assumption shows the deficiency of the thought experiment.

    If imagining two identical bodies does not work for substance dualism or physicalist monism then there is something wrong with the experiment.

    There is nothing wrong with the experimentS. My point was that plural.

    First, showing it does not work for Substance dualism disproves substance dualism.

    Second, a physicalist has no problem with duplicate minds or duplicate brains.
    Example 1: Some multiverse theories predict a very large number of universes with the same laws as our universe. Since the number of quantum configurations is finite, if the number of universes is large enough, there will be duplicate universes, including exact duplicates of thee, me, and that fellow behind the tree*. Since the causal chains for each copy are independent, I think most philosophers would agree that the copies are different persons.

    Example 2: In MWI, just after after a branch splits the (emergent) brains and supervening minds are duplicates. Here, because of the shared causal chain before the split, the issue of number of persons is vexed. See quantum immortality thread.

    ———————————–
    * link provided to explain purported humor

40. fifthmonarchyman:
    personal identity and the soul are concepts that are joined at the hip.

    Can someone who believes in souls also believe in the MWI? If so, how many souls before and after branches split?

41. fifthmonarchyman: It’s comments like this that let me know you don’t have a clue about what the concept of the Trinity is describing.

    Or maybe walto just has a sense of humor, and isn’t going to be concerned that someone takes offense at his jokes.

42. BruceS: Second, a physicalist has no problem with duplicate minds or duplicate brains.

    If two Bruces can exist in the quad can Bruce two kill Bruce one and not be guilty of murder?

    BruceS: I think most philosophers would agree that the copies are different persons.

    So then two identical bodies don’t “realize” the same mind.

    It seems like physicalist monism is disproved what am I missing?

    which is it?

    peace

43. Neil Rickert: Or maybe walto just has a sense of humor, and isn’t going to be concerned that someone takes offense at his jokes.

    That could be, but there continues to be no evidence that he understands it.

    I see no reason to keep this sort of knowledge secret if it exists

    peace

44. fifthmonarchyman: That could be, but there continues to be no evidence that he understands it.

    I see no reason to keep this sort of knowledge secret if it exists

    peace

    Let the joyous word be spread!!

45. Bruce:

    I think most philosophers would agree that the copies are different persons.

    fifth:

    So then two identical bodies don’t “realize” the same mind.

    It seems like physicalist monism is disproved what am I missing?

    You’re missing the obvious. Two identical bodies would be separate persons (with separate minds), just as two identical snow tires are nevertheless separate snow tires. The separate persons can lead separate lives, just as the separate snow tires can be placed on separate vehicles where they help tackle snowstorms in separate states.

    Also, note that the bodies remain identical only for an instant. They are in separate locations with differing environments, so their “trajectories” rapidly diverge.

    None of this is problematic for physicalism.

46. fifth,

    Regarding the Trinity, you’re missing my point (as expected). If common sense were the criterion, you’d have to reject the Trinity. Yet you don’t.

    So you write this…

    I think that everyone materialist or otherwise gets into trouble when we allow our worldview to intrude on that simple common sense understanding.

    …and then proceed to do precisely that, by allowing your Trinitarian worldview to “intrude on that simple common sense understanding.”

    It’s a standard fifthmonarchyman foot shot.

47. walto: Let the joyous word be spread!!

    OK,
    Spread it if you know it.
    If you don’t then I will continue to assume you don’t know what you reject.

    peace

48. The wicked witch at last is dead!

49. walto: The wicked witch at last is dead!

    😉

    Did you catch that Neil Rickert?
    nuff said.

    peace

50. BruceS: I was trying to apply the label “incomprehensible” only to a relation between my abilities and J-Mac’s comments.I believe thatmeans I am nowhere near breaking any TSZ rules.
    Some may go further and apply the term directly to his comments, or even to J-Mac himself, but I have not intentionally done so.

    As far as I know there is no one here that claims to be an expert in QM, quantum consciousness, retrocausality or neuroscience… So, until Penrose, Hameroff or Egnor join in, we are all pretty much safe….😉