Materialism (championed by Darwinists) makes reason Impossible.

[yy2bggggs]

One of the problems of materialism is that you're locked into a response where one of the duplicates must be you (either the original or a copy). There's no mechanism to account for "you" to refer to more than one brain/body because, as you put it: you are your brain (and body). So if you step into a transporter and a dozen identical copies step out the other end, you're stuck with trying to figure out which one is/was you. If you think you're your brain, and your brain is slowly replaced with something functionally equivalent, you're also stuck with trying to figure out when you stop being you.

I can see two problems with this. I'll attack the first one here.

The first problem I can see with this, is that the problem is artificial. It's not a problem with materialism that it does this thing per se. It's only a problem if you require something not to do this. That we cannot say which is the "original me" after a transporter cloning exercise isn't a problem if, as it turns out, you cannot say which is the "original me" after a transporter exercise. All this does is appeal to some intuitional invariant you're not only invoking, but not mentioning.

One of the advantages of invoking a soul is that it lets "you" refer to the original and all the duplicates, because "you" isn't equivalent to a single brain&body, as you define it to be. "You" refers to a soul, and there's no a priori reason why a soul should be limited to one brain and body.

Similar to the first problem with your account above, this statement has a problem in that the advantage is artificial. It's not an advantage with soul invoking that it lets you do this per se; it's only an advantage if you require something to do it. That you can make such a mapping between a soul and instantiated incarnations only means that you can make such a mapping. If, as it turns out, the mapping doesn't actually correlate to a meaningful consignment with reality, you'd still be able to make this mapping with a soul based approach, even though it doesn't correlate to reality. Again, the only advantage you've made is that you have appealed to an unmentioned intuitional invariant.

Another issue with this, however, which also leads to the second problem with your account of materialism, is that there is nothing in materialism per se that even leads to the first assessment, nor anything in a soul based approach that leads to the second. In materialistic considerations, the existence of a physical instantiation of pattern could easily be taken to represent "you"; in a non-corporeal spiritual consideration, the cloning could easily result in multiple souls. Therefore, quite the opposite of what you are saying--there's nothing preventing us from having your intuitional invariants, even if we want to keep them, in a materialistic universe, nor anything guaranteeing them in a spiritual universe. You, in effect, have the same exact problem with either.

So to answer the first question, replacing the neurons in my brain wouldn't confer any change in identity because my identity isn't bound up with my brain and physical body in the first place.

And how do you know that this is a correct statement?

 

[edge]

"misevaluate" assumes an evaluation, (a wrong one). What you should have said was

It would be like a vat of liquid not doing an evaluation.

Your claim is equivalent to claiming what's it like for a rock to misquote Shakespeare?. That doesn't entail that the proposition "rocks can quote Shakespeare" is gibberish. It's obviously false. Just like "a vat of hydrocloric acid can evaluate" is also false.

I read most of what you have said in here and you pretty much got it.
The last time an OBE happened to me, it happened accidentally and I took it as far as I could spiritually.
Because I was so aware I tested everything I knew about it as I had read up on how to do it on purpose.
It is exactly as reported and more.
It is the same and different, it also follows along as written in the Christian understanding along with other religious understandings.
That experience was a positive experience.
Before that one I had one other accidental experience that was negative after I gave up meditating on purpose to achieve out of body.
This first one is where I ran into a demon, the second one gave me one more opportunity to see the nature of the positive side.
I knew to look for the positive after seeing what the negative was like, so it followed.
Both were a confirmation on what is on the other side.

 

[lemurien]

Joobz:

1.) No evidence for a soul
2.) no evidence for reincarnation
3.) no evidence for a sharing of soul
4.) No evidence for identity needing a soul.


Of course you are right from the (our) materialistic point of view. It is clear.
But people have taken what they see and feel as evidence for the four things you mentioned for thousands of years. Questioning soul and the existence of deities is a recent thing and situating our consciousness in the brain even more recent.

Dr Paul Broca was among the first to to publish mental functions associated to brain areas in late 1800s. Santiago Ramon y Cajal (Nobel 1906) published his his theory of neuron as the functional unit of the brain only 110 years ago. Dr. Wilder Penfield mapped the cerebral cortex in the fifties. Scientific psychology took off with Skinner at the same time. Synapses date from 1962. Dr. Eric Kandel (Nobel 200) started studying their role in learning in his coworker the sea snail in the 70s and figured out stuff like DNA-mRNA interactions in learning.

This was yesterday, man!
People still think that the Sun orbits the earth and they do not have a clue why the Moon goes through its phases. How many do you think can figure out why days are shorter in winter in the northern hemisphere?

The scientific study of the human consciousness really took off when the two teams of Nobelists Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman put all their effort in the field. An extra spin was provided by CT, SPECT, MRI, fMRI, microinstrumentation of the brain and computer aided analysis of EEG and EMG and evoked potentials. The real revolution has only begun.

You do not expect the millennia-old tradition to change like that, at a flick of a switch?
Rather than dismissing the dualistic ideas, it would be much more interesting to study how come people have such a strong preference to these beliefs over the bulk of evidence the materialistic approach has gathered in the recent decades.

What makes us see subjects where there are none (in the natural phenomena) or insist on an order imposed by a superior being where only a chaos could be objectively observed (talking about the random events of our everyday life)?

What is the essence of the human being, why isn't he (or me) rational, why does he do things against his better knowledge, why cannot he control himself?

I do not think that peeing contests with the religious people really take us any further on the road to knowledge. One cannot make anybody to change his mind by dismissing his/her beliefs and ways of thinking or calling him/her an idiot (by any name).
Time wasted.

 

[zooterkin]

hydrochloric acid may be unable to evaluate the pythagorean theorem, but there are automated theorem proving machines (computers) made of "chemicals" than can evaluate theorems. Read about them here.

Or just go to your local shopping mall or High Street and look around you.

 

[zooterkin]

You do not expect the millennia-old tradition to change like that, at a flick of a switch?
Rather than dismissing the dualistic ideas, it would be much more interesting to study how come people have such a strong preference to these beliefs over the bulk of evidence the materialistic approach has gathered in the recent decades.

I agree that's certainly interesting, and I'm pretty sure it is being studied as part of understanding how the brain works; why we have this strong sense of self. It doesn't mean dualism is correct, and it is not wrong to dismiss it as the explanation for consciousness.

 

[lemurien]

Malerin:"How is this true? Countless people report experiencing God's presence. Experiencing the presence of an entity is clearly a "detection" of it."

Lemurien: Countless people detect an experience.
That is totally different from detecting the existence of God.

Malerin: How do you know that?

Lemurien: Simple.
For instance, if I rub my eyes, I see flashes of yellow light.
There is no yellow light anywhere but still I have the experience of it.
ergo: The experience can exist without the real thing.

 

[lemurien]

I agree that's certainly interesting, and I'm pretty sure it is being studied as part of understanding how the brain works; why we have this strong sense of self. It doesn't mean dualism is correct, and it is not wrong to dismiss it as the explanation for consciousness.

I personally see the Cartesian dualism as a dead end.
There has been nothing new coming from that branch of research since centuries and the methods just do not add up to anything that might be coming up with 'evidence'.

I know there are people who disagree. I do not consider their argumentation as valid for the time being. Maybe, if they come up with something new or –which is more probable– if I get a vascular insult or an abscess in my temporal lobe, my thinking will change.

My opinion.

 

[lemurien]

Whereas I'd gladly accept other forms of dualism such as for instance
-the medium the information it contains
-a mass and its movement
-an instrument and the sound it makes
-two sport teams and a match

The 'soul stuff' that Descartes was talking about seem to be an illusion created by the electrochemical neural mapping patterns of the brain. So add another one:

-real world and our neural representation of it

 

[Soapy Sam]

Malerin:"How is this true? Countless people report experiencing God's presence. Experiencing the presence of an entity is clearly a "detection" of it."

Lemurien: Countless people detect an experience.
That is totally different from detecting the existence of God.

Malerin: How do you know that?

Lemurien: Simple.
For instance, if I rub my eyes, I see flashes of yellow light.
There is no yellow light anywhere but still I have the experience of it.
ergo: The experience can exist without the real thing.

How do you know there is no yellow light unless you open your eyes to look? For all you know, sparks come out your ears when you do this. If you keep playing with yourself like this you may go blind.
You might stick a camera up your nose I suppose...
Personally, I am convinced that when I rub my eyes, the whole universe goes around in purple and yellow phosphene patterns.
I may become a philosopher.

But first, I shall have breakfast.

 

[punshhh]

Thank you! I didn't mean it to be a "call out" type thing; I would have respected your privacy if you hadn't wished to share it and made no judgments about you because of that.

Cool, its interesting what scientific explanations have been given. I don't think anyone has been able to explain what the phenomena was though.

 

[punshhh]

Did you watch the video Sideroxylon linked to?

And how on earth are you determining that the feeling was delivered to you from elsewhere?

Yes I did watch the video. I am the only witness, I only mentioned it to one other person years later(my younger brother) long after I had thought about what had happened at length.

When I say the feeling was delivered from elsewhere, I mean it just happened with out my being involved in the generation of the grief. If someone had told me that the cat had died, I would have experienced a similar feeling, however I would have understood the situation and felt sadness and grief through a thought process.
On this ocassion the feeling just happened without any understanding of the situation. As such I had nothing to relate it too, it was very puzzling and I didn't know what I was sad about.

 

[punshhh]

Addendum:

I'm curious, why do you say you were experiencing the same emotional shock? By your account, your emotional state was out of proportion for the situation until you were informed what the situation was.

Yes the intensity of my shock and the shock of my family may have been different. I do consider that I over emphasize the intensity when I think about it. There was also the shock of the feeling coming out of nowhere.

I have asked the others how shocked they were at the time and they say it was sudden for them as they had only just walked into the house on returning from a holiday, expecting a happy reunion. But rather before they had settled where told the news as soon as they entered the room.

The cat had been a close member of the family for 11 years. So it was quite a wrench, especially for my younger brother and sister who were not much older than the cat.

 

[Sideroxylon]

I personally see the Cartesian dualism as a dead end.
There has been nothing new coming from that branch of research since centuries and the methods just do not add up to anything that might be coming up with 'evidence'.

I know there are people who disagree. I do not consider their argumentation as valid for the time being. Maybe, if they come up with something new or –which is more probable– if I get a vascular insult or an abscess in my temporal lobe, my thinking will change.

My opinion.

It is a redundant idea and a failed paradigm because it brings nothing to our understanding of the world. What observations has the existence of souls predicted? Our best human narratives do such a thing, giving us insight into the workings of the world that lead to technological applications.

The understanding that our concious experiences are the result of electro-chemical activities in our brains led to the use of surgery and drugs as successful treatments for mental conditions once considered maladies of the soul. These treatments replaced rituals like exorcism that were based on the soul paradigm.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Yes I did watch the video. I am the only witness, I only mentioned it to one other person years later(my younger brother) long after I had thought about what had happened at length.

When I say the feeling was delivered from elsewhere, I mean it just happened with out my being involved in the generation of the grief. If someone had told me that the cat had died, I would have experienced a similar feeling, however I would have understood the situation and felt sadness and grief through a thought process.
On this ocassion the feeling just happened without any understanding of the situation. As such I had nothing to relate it too, it was very puzzling and I didn't know what I was sad about.

A major point of the video was the fallibility of human perception, cognition and memory. You don't seem to have taken this on board.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Cool, its interesting what scientific explanations have been given. I don't think anyone has been able to explain what the phenomena was though.

Can you demonstrate that your explanation of a mechanism as yet know to science being at work is true? Bear in mind that "I can't explain it" is not a blank check for any idea that you fancy.

 

[punshhh]

The problem is that there is nothing in what you said which point to a new phenomena, as it is actually already explanable from what we know from, human psychology, and its bias ! We all suffer from those, so it is not an attack on your feeling, jsut pointing out that you cannot demonstrate that there was a correlation, and indeed almost certainly it was a selection bias at play. We all suffer from it as human !

I experienced a sudden feeling of grief and sadness for no reason, while standing in a quiet peaceful place.

I appreciate that there may have been some kind of communication from the other people, but I remember at the time that I did not hear any screams or cries. There may have been some high frequency signal of some kind.

 

[lemurien]

How do you know there is no yellow light unless you open your eyes to look? For all you know, sparks come out your ears when you do this. If you keep playing with yourself like this you may go blind.
You might stick a camera up your nose I suppose...
Personally, I am convinced that when I rub my eyes, the whole universe goes around in purple and yellow phosphene patterns.
I may become a philosopher.

But first, I shall have breakfast.

Good plan.

My favorite philosopher is Winnie the Pooh.
He might be yours, too?

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said."

This one is even relevant to the discussion:

"When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it."


and to sum it all up:

"A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself."

(no way I can stick a 5DII up my nose)

 

[devnull]

I experienced a sudden feeling of grief and sadness for no reason, while standing in a quiet peaceful place.

Yes. After returning from a holiday, back to your normal life.

 

[punshhh]

A major point of the video was the fallibility of human perception, cognition and memory. You don't seem to have taken this on board.

I understand this, however I analyzed the situation at the time within a few minutes. The circumstances and the event were clear and unambiguos.

I was stood on a driveway approx 10m from the house.
My family were in the kitchen approx 25m from me, along a long corridor and through a door to the left.
I experienced the emotion at approximately the same time that my brother told my family, give or take say 30 seconds.

I then walked into the kitchen and was told the news about 1.5 to 2minutes later.

This is the entire situation, it is very clear and I went over the sequence of events carefully within the next five minutes. So that I would remember what happened.

 

[lemurien]

I am sorry about you losing your cat and I do not in any way want to offend you.

It is just that when people 'go over the sequence of events' they have a tendency to rearrange them so that they make sense. Subjective sense if the person is doing it alone and group agreement if he is sharing his account with somebody else. This is a well known thing to crime investigators and one of the reasons why the witnesses are not allowed to meet each other before the hearings.

When I read my old notes I am very surprised of the things I have thought and said.
It seems, every time one wakes up he reinvents himself.
This is much easier to spot in other people whose versions of some common experiences are completely unrecognizable.

About one week after my brother's funeral, his daughter was walking with her two sons on a sidewalk in Helsinki. She heard her father's voice call her:
"Tiia, go to the other side of the road, quick!"

Having learned that it is better to obey when there is this certain tone of voice, she changed sides.

About ten seconds later there was a big noise as snow and ice fell from the roofs on the spot where she would have been walking with her sons if not for the warning.

(a nice one, huh?)