A problem with the idea that consciousness/mind is separate from the body (apart from the problem of interaction and other science-based issues with dualism), is that every observable or reportable aspect of consciousness can be modified by specific kinds of interference with specific parts of the brain, from cognitive capacity, moral judgement, and emotional state, to the various aspects of the sense of self, awareness, personality, and memory.
I have seen a ghost so this will work. I saw the ghost just like one would see a person, in fact I did not know it was a ghost until it walked through the wall. However my eyes are not able to see a ghost. Our eyes just see a frequency of light, we will call that step A. Our brains then reinterpret that into an image with color, depth perception, and qualia - step B. The reconstructed image is then presented to the consciousness - step C. The conscious then has an experience which is step D. A ghost connects at step B. Step B is entirely about information processing, and I think the new information is just inserted. So as far as we know we are seeing the ghost with our eyes, but really the fact that is ghost is before us begins at step B.
I believe in a unique model of dualism, but in all types of dualism the model is that of either a car and driver or a musician and a piano. If you smash the piano, the music will sound awful but the pianist is unharmed.
What about cases reported with multiple witnesses and/or physical evidence? I have heard of several cases where a ghost apparently stole jewelry for a period of time and later returned it under eerie circumstances. This may have happened to me with a wooden cross necklace several years ago, but in my case I was the only witness (aside from my cat
). The cross seemed to drop out of thin air on the floor in front of me while I was standing and praying. My cat was startled and hissed at it. This incident was very disturbing, because I couldn't understand how a material object could disappear from the physical world for a time and then rematerialize a while later. Of course hallucination is a possible explanation.
There also must be a mechanism for how this speculative ghost effect works. A hallucination begins in our brains, so that is simple enough to understand the mechanism, but a ghost is external to our brains. The supernatural ghost is supposedly effecting the natural human brain and the supernatural ghost is also supposedly observing (being affected by) the natural world. So there is an interface there that we need to understand. In the natural world there are things like the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of angular momentum and so on. We need to know how supernatural connects with these laws too. IMO
Perhaps you could explain how or why, as I pointed out before, every aspect of the mind we can observe or report can be modified by specific interference with brain function, in ways that would not be expected if those aspects were independent of the brain.
So what does it do?
What information is stored in spiritual memories? i.e. what is it about, what does it concern?
The mind is what the brain does; i.e. it is the patterns of activity of interacting neurons that process information (from the senses, memory, and other internal processes). Subjective experience is what it is like to be such a system running a particular set of processes that integrates body maps and self-image into a simplified and limited model of itself.
I see minds as effectively deterministic, in as much as macro-scale physics is effectively deterministic. It's possible that non-deterministic quantum effects contribute some randomness, or are even used in optimizing some specific low-level functions, but the bulk of 'random' contributions will be macro-scale pseudo-randomness (thermal and EM noise, and non-linear dynamics), and these are very much a low-level background - else the brain 'circuitry' could not function the way it does.
You're presupposing a supernatural ghost. We know that glitches in the visual system and other areas can cause such experiences, and we also know that dream imagery can be merged with or mistaken for episodic or autobiographical memory on recall, so proposing an unexplained (inexplicable?) supernatural phenomenon is redundant. The principle of parsimony applies - the brain can generate that stuff without supernatural involvement.
Two problems there - if a force has any observable or measurable influence on the physical world, it is a physical influence, which implies it must exert a physical force.
It's also not uncommon for dream content to be recalled as a real memory, or even merged with a real memory, or for real memories to merge together, or to incorporate personalised memories from books or films, or stories told by others (i.e. if you imagined yourself in that position, it's potential false memory fodder).
What about cases reported with multiple witnesses and/or physical evidence? I have heard of several cases where a ghost apparently stole jewelry for a period of time and later returned it under eerie circumstances. This may have happened to me with a wooden cross necklace several years ago, but in my case I was the only witness (aside from my cat
Cloudy asked me what my belief was. I never presented it as a fact, so not sure what the outburst is about.
That's an argument against there being a pianist; in reality, could you find a specific way to change the rhythm of a piece the pianist was playing? Could you damage part of the piano so it produced a different tune to the one the pianist played (swapping the strings around wouldn't make an intelligible tune)? I don't think so - you'd have to disable the whole piano; it's not a suitable analogy. If you could specifically change every aspect of the music by interfering with the piano it would be good evidence that it was a player piano (pianola) without a pianist.
The apprehension of abstractions can be compromised in specific ways by brain injury. Looks like that's another thing the brain does.
Are you suggesting the spirit only receives information from the brain, rather than sending to it? If not, what information does the spirit send to the brain?
It's a set of communicating processes, dynamic patterns of neural activity in the brain.
These are patterns of signalling activity that process information.
Yes you do - it's called being conscious. Consciousness is what happens when brain activity involves a particular kind of activity (a particular set of processes). That's why we can modify specific aspects of your consciousness by modifying specific aspects of the system running those processes.
It depends exactly what you mean by 'individual'. When you go to sleep, brain activity changes to a number of different 'modes' through the night. In dreaming sleep some aspects of your consciousness are active, but voluntary muscle control is disabled, and internally generated fragmentary images and narratives replace the real-world modelling of sensory input. At times pathways involving consciousness itself are disabled (there's a specific area of the mid-brain that appears to be involved in regulating it), and it ceases until they're enabled again. Occasionally, areas producing full consciousness become active while the dream state continues, producing a lucid dream.
There is stochastic randomness at the quantum level, i.e. it's probabilistic. At macro scales, this normally 'averages out' to give a near-as-dammit determinism.
Sorry if I misunderstood you; you said, "... So as far as we know we are seeing the ghost with our eyes, but really the fact that is ghost is before us begins at step B." It gave me the impression you were asserting a fact.Cloudy asked me what my belief was. I never presented it as a fact, so not sure what the outburst is about.
I'm not presupposing a supernatural ghost. I would say the first step in a hypothesis (e.g. "supernatural ghost") is to clearly define what it means and especially what it implies. The implications are areas where falsification is possible. The principle of parsimony would come later when we are comparing two explanations that "work" and we need to decide which explanation is best. At this point, I'm not clear that a "supernatural ghost" even works as an explanation. Ghosts haven't even earned a ticket to the Occam's Razor Barber Shop yet, because I'm confused about how ghosts are supposed to work.
That is the reason why I think that science can investigate questions like ghosts and gods. If the hypothesized supernatural world interfaces to the natural world, then it becomes accessible to science.
I am saying that the mind requires the brain, and there's nothing we know about consciousness that suggests any external contribution from 'spirit'; i.e. what we know about consciousness is consistent with the 'pianola' hypothesis rather than the 'pianist plays the piano' hypothesis.
Biochemistry is what allows life. Vitalism died 100 years ago. The pianola plays on its own.
Intuition comes from the unconscious mind working on past experience. That's why the intuitions and hunches about domains you have experience and/or expertise in are so much more reliable than others.
Sorry, I can't make sense of that - perhaps you could rephrase it?
No, but those processes constitute conscious experience. You don't have an experience of being an ecosystem of trillions of cells, more than half of which are bacterial, either. Consciousness is a particular set of neural activities in the brain, just as running is a particular set of activities of leg muscles. Stimulate the brain here and you experience a familiar smell, stimulate it there and you recall a vivid memory, stimulate it elsewhere and you experience intense sadness, and so-on; the patterns of activity in the brain change correspondingly.
These are just unsupported assertions; I have no experience of thousands of years, or a soul, or death. Some people have a belief that includes a soul that lives on after death; other people have other, equally unsupported, beliefs. Meh.
Semantic/philosophical quibbles. Is TV less of a TV when it's switched off?
I'm not sure how you're defining 'knowledge' & 'belief' here, and 'skillful' seems redundant - IMO, what matters is whether or not the system can distinguish consistent patterns in the data it receives from the environment, not how skillfully it can do it.
By the same token, you might think that your points have validity, but that is just the perception that was determined by your material substrate. In the world of subjective experience, it's all moot - we have no access to the full determinants of our behaviour. As Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice...”
Ah, OK; so you were referring to the perceptual experience rather than its cause.
