Sujet : Re: Making your mind up
De : martinharran (at) *nospam* gmail.com (Martin Harran)
Groupes : talk.originsDate : 29. Apr 2024, 17:46:33
Autres entêtes
Organisation : University of Ediacara
Message-ID : <ngev2j911dkalaitodoq05gppncjqnq3gu@4ax.com>
References : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
User-Agent : ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272
On Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:12:31 +0200, Arkalen <
arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
On 27/04/2024 10:09, Martin Harran wrote:
I'm snipping a lot of stuff here because I think some of the
discussion is moving towards endless circles. Also, my time for this
is a bit limited so I'm cutting to what I think are some of the key
points.
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I'm a bit confused because you said earlier that "you accept science can
only study visible behavior" but now it seems you categorize gravity as
non-visible while agreeing it's something science can and does study.
I meant that gravity does have visible 'behaviour' - we can see the
apple falling from the tree and start to test/quantify different
things falling from different heights and so on.
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>
In terms of why I originally brought this up, I was responding to your
statement that "science cannot explain consciousness of which
decision-making is a subset". I probably misread the sentence as saying
science cannot explain those things *in principle* when you actually
just meant that science can't explain them *right now*.
Yes, I meant science can't explain them right *now* but I also
expressed my opinion that science is focused on a particular approach
- neurological research - which I don't think will *on its own*
provide an explanation.
Even so I'm
surprised at the idea that science currently cannot explain
decision-making - but then I'm not sure what level of explanation you
were thinking of with that sentence.
Science can explain the neurological process that go on inside the
brain whilst we are making decisions but cannot explain how we arrive
at a particular decision.
>
But all that to say "visible" in this context referred to the fact that
if we think of consciousness as causing our visible behavior, then
science absolutely could explain it in principle. And I probably
misunderstood you when I thought this was something you might disagree with.
As I've said before, neurology has allowed us to get an incredible
understanding of the 'mechanics' of the brain but also as I've said
before, I see that like an electronics engineer who has an incredible
depth of knowledge about the electronic processes going on in my
computer but that doesn't give him any understanding about the ideas I
am using that computer to express.
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>
Science doesn't reject dualism in principle, it rejects it because no
dualism hypothesis meets the standards of a scientific hypothesis. "I
think we should be able to figure out ways of studying the effects and
symptoms that would come from dualism" is exactly correct! Can you give
examples of such effects or symptoms?
Okay, to take an area that intrigues me. If our mind is just the
products of our body, I would expect it to be under the control of
that body. In practice, however, it is a two-way process- our minds
can also control our bodies. For example, placebos can "cure" people
even though they have no medicinal value whatsoever. Or take
hypnotism; someone can put me into a hypnotic state where I no longer
feel pain. That hypnosis is induced by an external force which shows
that control of our mind is not confined to our own bodies.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying these are validation of dualism but
they are indicators of our minds being capable of being influenced by
*external* forces.
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