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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?

But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.

none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind

Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.

We really have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. We're barely further than antic medicine on this particular issue and it's almost purely down to the invention of MRI. Given most of the stuff people care about in this debate probably happens in the deeper regions of the brain we're even unlikely to get anywhere close to asking the right questions when Neuralink is tested on many humans.

But we are making some progress, so maybe someday we'll be able to have a meaningful debate about what consciousness is instead of hypothesizing about Motoko Kusanagi.

Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.

I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.

The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.

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