This most recent exchange just serves to further humiliate you in the eyes of anyone reading the thread.
…you mean all two of them. Wow…gotta say…I am really feelin it. Some heavy duty humiliation goin on there. Here’s a pro-tip Argumemnon: no one cares (except you of course). But nice to see your friends all support you…or not.
Don't be surprised when your own behaviour comes back to bite you in the ass.
…what were you expecting…that Beelzebuddy would ride in and smite me or something? Beelzebuddy doesn’t care. You’ve actually gotta fight your own battles here.
No. Let's refresh what you and I were actually talking about. We were talking about the nonsensical brain radio theory, and I said that were it true, we'd at least be able to detect through the brain's visible activity that something we don't know is causing it to do stuff, as opposed to now.
You have not addressed this. Instead you have retreated to your usual argument from ignorance, even though this isn't what we're talking about, showing that once again you don't even read the posts that are directed at you, and now you're entirely confused about what it is that we were talking about in the first place. Bravo.
So this is your claim then. That we could detect if something we can’t measure in any way is causing the brain to do stuff.
As that quote I’ve included quite clearly demonstrates…nobody explicitly knows how the brain produces a ‘you’ (nobody even knows what a ‘you’ actually is). If you are going to claim that this is not the case, then provide evidence to support your claim. Beelzebuddy’s statement supports that quote…and, as I said, I can find a direct quote from another cognitive scientist who has already posted on this thread. I can get a lot more to support this conclusion as well.
But …my point is that this phenomenon – how the physical activity of the brain generates consciousness – is not known. Mine is the default position. Something is not known until it can be demonstrated that it is.
You are the one who is making the positive claim. That it is known. You have yet to provide a shred of evidence to support your claim. LarryS asked you for some.
Where…is…it?
One of the direct consequences of your claim would be that this thread would simply not exist. Why?....cause Chopra would not be able to make dumb claims about the origins of consciousness if science could actually explain the origins of consciousness.
Thus…until you can support your
... claim, the consensus in neuroscience is what we have. That consensus says we have no idea as to the direct cause of consciousness.
Your OTHER claim is the one you have just repeated. That if there were something that we could not detect influencing brain activity / consciousness…then we could detect it by adjudicating all that neural / cognitive activity that so far you have utterly failed to provide the slightest explanation for.
Your
... argument #2 basically boils down to this:
There are demonstrably colossal amounts that we do not know about neural and cognitive activity (there isn’t a neuroscientist on the planet that would disagree with that) but somehow…in ways that you have so far completely failed to provide a shred of evidence for (‘molecules moving’ does not actually qualify as an explanation)…we would be capable of determining exactly when some force that we cannot detect is influencing cognitive activity that, for the most part, we cannot explain.
How…precisely.
I want explicit physics. I want actual evidence. Not your usual stupid hand-waving. I want links. References. Get every bit as down and dirty chemically and biologically as you want. I’ve been through a pile of this stuff before with Nonpareil and Pixy. It took a while…but they both turned out to be completely wrong. Nonpareil even admitted as much (very grudgingly). It’s all there in black in white if you want to go and see what your future holds.
Start with an explicit empirical scientific definition of this thing you call “the brain’s visible activity”. Is there any activity that is not…’visible’? What are the specific scanning technologies used to adjudicate this ‘visible’ activity (Henry Markram will certainly want to know if you’ve got some wondrous new technology up your sleeve)’? What degree of granularity are these scanning technologies capable of…both temporal and spatial? What degree of granularity is required to explicitly and definitively adjudicate neural activity to the degree required to conclusively exclude any and all unknown forces (this…btw…is your claim…that this capability exists…so prove it)? What specific technology can adjudicate cognitive activity? What degree of granularity is required to explicitly and definitively adjudicate cognitive activity to the degree required to conclusively exclude any and all unknown forces (also your claim).
I already know a bunch about this stuff…but you seem determined to ignore any requirement to provide evidence to support your arguments. So…if you’re going to argue that we can measure this stuff (and how that explicitly implicates the ‘unknown’)…then provide evidence to support it. I’ve already made my argument. There’s no way we know enough to dismiss Chopra’s claims (anymore than he knows enough to confirm them). Anyone in the first week of the first year of any higher level cognitive science class will know that.
As I said earlier…the ONLY reason Chopra can get away with making his claims (and the only reason this thread exists) is precisely because science is so limited in it’s understanding of neural / cognitive activity. But you insist on arguing that science is not thus limited.
You insist on arguing that Beelzebuddy’s statement is, in effect…wrong.
Then back up your stupid claims with evidence. This is a skeptics forum. On a skeptics forum you either produce evidence to support your claims…or you STFU.
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Edited by jsfisher:
Edited for compliance with Rules 0 and 12 of the Membership Agreement.
