On Saturday, 19 April, I’m supposed to be in a debate on campus. It’s with Angus Menuge of Concordia University and the Discovery Institute, a fellow who did not impress Josh Rosenau, and who professes to have been converted by C.S. Lewis, which bodes ill right there. The organization has been a low-level, simmering clusterkluge ever since a few students asked me to do this months ago, exemplified now by the signs that have gone up all over campus that misspell my name (of course), and by this amazing announcement of the topic on the campus Lutheran ministry web page.
SPRING RETREAT: The Spring LSF Retreat will be held April 19th at the U of M, Morris chapter. Dr. Angus Menuge, professor at Concordia University Wisconsin will be the main speaker. There will also be a debate between Dr. Menuge and Professor P.Z. Myers (UMM) discussing “Does neuroscience leave room for God”. Myers has postulated that the reason people believe in God is because there are “ghosts” in their brains, and as Pastor Jarvis understands it Myers believes that theists have something wrong in the way their brains function that make them believe in God. If you have any questions regarding this debate, please forward them to Pastor Jarvis from UMM. rjarvis@hometownsolutions.net. If you are interested in going to the retreat please see Shaina or Pastor.
I am always impressed at how much creationists can get wrong in one sentence.
Anyway, I don’t think this will be much of a debate. Menuge will drone out some theology, the creationists in the audience will be happy; I plan on discussing some real neuroscience, and if that audience listens they might learn something, but more likely they’ll come away with some mangled, confused mess of scrambled ideas, like “Myers thinks there are ghosts! In brains!”, that gets everything completely wrong. I am not going into this with a high estimation of the majority of the audience, unless, of course, you show up. I may have to invite students in my classes to go just to bring more good minds into the room.
I wonder if Menuge is getting coached by his fellow Fellow, Michael Egnor?
I have Space Ghost in MY brain.
I’m pretty sure I have a ghost in my head right now. No, wait… it’s just a headache from reading what pastor Jarvis “understands”.
Wait a minute here — isn’t it theists who proudly declare they have ghosts in their brains? You know, “souls” and “being filled with the holy spirit” and all that?
If there’s something strange in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
So what idea of yours have they horribly mangled to arrive at “Brain Ghosts?”
No ghosts in brains, it’s The Ghost In The Shell:
http://ghostintheshell2ndgig.manga.com/
Do these ignoramuses lack the ability to understand the English language,or are they just lying for Jesus?
I have a Spam Ghost in MY brain.
I spent 3 hours talking to a creationist cousin. Its so wearisome. She thought the bible was absolute truth, ignoring any argument or evidence I provided. :(….good luck!
Well. PZ, I hope you’re handsomely paid for that obvious time waster!
Wouldn’t it be more rewarding to explain the stuff you’re to present to some bricks and tree stumps???
Sure as hell they’d be a brighter audience than the IDiots.
How long before that gets quote-mined? (Errrrmm….not too long actually)
According to a post by PZ Myers on the 8th of April 2008,
…….”the reason people believe in God is because there are “ghosts” in their brains”
and…….
“theists have something wrong in the way their brains function that make them believe in God”
Are these brain-dwelling ghosts related to the space aliens that Professor Dawkins believes in?
Next, they’ll be telling their gurgling masses that PZ Myers is advocating trepanation to release the godly brain ghosts to create his own personal zombie army.
Sounds an awful lot like Scientology’s “thetans” to me…
I think we should all pitch in to buy PZ a Space Ghost costume so he can wear it to the debate. http://images.buycostumes.com/mgen/merchandiser/17957.jpg
This should absolutely happen.
Just when I thought I understood how stupid the Disco Institute is, they go and achieve new heights of brain-killing oxygen deprivation. Congratulations DI, you have set a new world record for stupid.
Are people seriously “converted” by CS Lewis’ sophomoric arguments?
I’ve thought for a long time that apologetics stuff like Lewis’ (and the even more dumbed-down works of Josh McDowell, which are pretty much just stolen from Lewis anyway) aren’t intended to convert, but just to bring believers with doubts back into the fold.
In other words, the sort of people who are “mad at God” for some tragedy in their life, or for other personal reasons. These people still retain the same fundamental assumptions about the world that they had when they considered themselves believers, and so they still, at some level, believe in God, they’re just “mad at him”.
And because they’ve been told that atheists are simply “mad at God”, they consider themselves atheists. It’s not a matter of evidence to them, which is fortunate since Lewis doesn’t supply any that wouldn’t be convincing to a neutral observer who can freely consider that there are possibilities other than “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” — possibilities like “Misquoted, Misunderstood, or Made-Up”.
PZ, this may shift the debate into an area where you won’t want to take it, but if this guy is going to make his “conversion” a critical part of this debate, it’s probably worthwhile to find out his background. Was he raised a Christian? Was he a “mad at God” type of “atheist”? Did he still retain his supernaturalistic, faith-based assumptions even when he was supposedly a nonbeliever?
(Yes yes, we’re getting into “No True Scotsman” territory here, but getting to the root of your opponent’s assumptions is important in a debate.)
In this case, it seems absolutely crucial to lay out a definition for what atheism really is, and what atheists are typically usually like.
Another dupe of C.S. Lewis.
Oh, joy.
Angus says:
I had a somewhat Christian upbringing with a mixture of Roman Catholic and Church of England elements. Whilst a teenager, I became an agnostic, but retained an interest in religion and continued to find religious answers more persuasive than secular ones. Whilst at University I met the woman (Vicki Lynn Hubert) who is now my wife. She drew me back to the church, and I became an adult confirm and of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. This helped to heal the wounds of my heart, but I still lacked an intellectual foundation for my faith. It was here, whilst I was supposed to be doing research in basically secular philosophy, that an unplanned (by me) foray into the works of C. S. Lewis was crucial. It all started with Surprised by Joy.
What some people will do for love…
Try to use the word “whilst” a lot in your talk. Very impressive sounding.
PZ,
You just might want find out if Pastor Jarvis is there. If so, call him out onto the carpet in front of the entire audience and ask him specifically where he got his idea that you believe in ‘ghosts’ and that theists have something wrong with their brains. That ought to rattle a few people.
Wait… that would just be too mean, framing the evening like that. Wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings now.
Oh okay, I just checked his profile, and surprise surprise, he’s been a lifelong Christian who flirted with “agnosticism” while a teenager.
So no doubt this guy will come to the debate with all sorts of goofy assumptions of how atheism is rooted in adolescent rebellion, anger at God, etc. etc.
And I ask again, has anyone not raised Christian found CS Lewis at all convincing?
Try to use the word “whilst” a lot in your talk. Very impressive sounding.
Yeah, what a windbag pseudointellectual. He’s not even using it correctly.
This guy is way over his head here. Looking forward to seeing PZ shred him.
Oopps,
Just realized Pastor Jarvis may not have said that you believe in ‘ghosts’ in the brain, though obviously he did say “Myers believes that theists have something wrong in the way their brains function that make them believe in God.”
actually, i think the three “L’s” have pretty much got it covered. a quick read of the NT shows that, if Jesus wasn’t God, he was certainly a wee bit schizophrenic by anyone’s standards.
Whilst a teenager, I became an agnostic, but retained an interest in religion and continued to find religious answers more persuasive than secular ones.
Geesh. He uses “whilst” in his Personal Background. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but how did he become agnostic if he still found religious answers more persuasive? Having some doubt in your faith (which is what it sounds like) is different from questioning the existence of God (in any religion).
I used to attend these sort of events. I found them to be generally depressing and a waste of time. one must enjoy arguing with fence posts.
Alex said:
Sorry to nitpick but doesn’t that statement rely on the NT as being a faithful record of Jesus’s actual sayings and doings, rather than a record of what people writing 30 years (at least) after his death, thought he should have said and done?
Actually, I find Menuge so irrelevant and clueless that I plan to go in and talk about just neuroscience. I can’t believe he’ll be so foolish as to wander in and start babbling about C.S. Lewis…but then, I have been surprised by the depths of absurdity to which Disco Boys will sink before.
What are your theories on goblins? I had previously thought that the habitat of both ghosts and goblins was confined to the underside of beds and closets, but your new theory concerning ghosts residing in brains may totally blow all previous conjectures out of the water!
Seriously, I would refuse to debate someone whose position had anything to do with ghosts residing in brains. They are either in need of psychiatric care or a child. (I know this is pretty much the dominant view outside my ivory tower.)
Ssshh! Don’t tell Angus Menuge what PZ really thinks: “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief.”
Clarificatory: Just imagine inviting to debate at a cafe scientifique someone who held the position Pastor dude attributes to PZ. Ridiculous cruelty.
Jervis’s org, the University Lutheran Chapel, has a Bible timeline that says the creation took place in 4117 B.C.
Is this place funded in any way by the University? Because they are spreading ignorance. At a university. Arrrggghhh!
I don’t know about you lot but I certainly found CS Lewis convincing. You’re not getting me in the back of that wardrobe. That great bloody lion might eat me!
“…Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod.”
Didn’t think he, or Pastor Jarvis, were ELCA. “Ghosts in the brain” is pretty standard discourse for LCMS. At least he’s not WELS.
I always thought that goblins must have retreated to the wastelands of Mordor after the return of the King.
Now which corners of the globe have we not ruled out as being “Mordor”? Oh… I see…
Well in that case they must have gone back through the wardrobe.
C.S. Lewis always thought that Tolkien had a few things wrong in his theology.
if he was raised and educated in the UK, then i’ll give him a pass on ‘whilst’. it really is a lot more common there, in all levels of speech, and is not the infallible mark of insufferable pomposity that it is here in the US.
on the other hand, why give him a pass in any case?
ROTFLMAO! Yes! YES! We so have to buy PZ a Space Ghost costume!
Disco Institute Press Release: PZ Myers believes he is Space Ghost…
PZ, you left out this tidbit:
“We will also discuss Ben Stein’s movie, “Expelled” which documents how teachers and scientists alike are being ridiculed daily, denied tenure and even fired for believing that there is evidence of “design” in nature and challenging the current belief that life is entirely a result of random chance.”
Nice preemptive attack on their part. “PZ Myers, Satanist and baby rapist, will be debating…”
geezus, crimmeywillerkers! they have a hard time spelling myers? its not like they’re trying to spell pharyngula.
g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-Ghosts!?
Zoinks! Jinkies! Maybe they’re pirate ghosts, at least.
What, are they paying you in Scooby Snacks® now?
And watch out for those meddling kids!
PZany will do just fine. He, like Dawk, is un-cock-frickin’ blockable.
Ah, C.S. Lewis and his great argument, “Gandalf: liar, lunatic or wizard?”
What?
Here’s a very persuasive (SFW) video about Narnia:
http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a25c39216aee6240116b1a659d90150
I love the way this Press Release leaves no room for the possibility that “Pastor Jarvis” might just have understood things a wee bit wrong here.
I never thought I’d type this but for once C.S Lewis’s options (or 2/3rds of them at any rate) are applicable here. These people are either lunatics or liars, the only question left is which one.
#31 “Jervis’s org, the University Lutheran Chapel, has a Bible timeline that says the creation took place in 4117 B.C.
Is this place funded in any way by the University? Because they are spreading ignorance. At a university. Arrrggghhh!”
Quite. Surely everyone knows Archbishop James Ussher proved it was 4004 B.C.? At the nightfall preceding October 23 (by the Julian calendar of course). I greatly regret to note that S.J. Gould, in “Questioning the Millennium”, falls into the meridianist error, falsely alleging that Ussher’s calculations indicated creation at noon on October 23. God has reserved a special eternal punishment, too terrible to be described, for those who insolently assert this heretical belief!
True Bob (#6) stole my joke. And, you know, I’d much rather watch anime than debate Angus Menuge. . . .
Lilly,
You say that like those two possibilities are somehow mutually exclusive. In my experience the really whacky creationists are both.
Louis
Could somebody get this on video please? Or at least upload the audio. kthxbai.
Any chance the great debate will be covered in “The News From Lake Wobegon”???
I can’t believe it, Myers insisting yet again that he has the expertise and the right to talk about science to religious believers!!!!!!!!!
Since Myers refuses to listen to reason, I say we stuff his mouth with Nisbet’s hair net and bound him with the electrical cord from Nisbet’s hair dryer to prevent him from damaging science’s good name any further.
Explaining neurology/ behavior to people who devoutly believe the body is just a vessel that imprisons the soul and that the brain acts as control room that this soul tries to operate is a losing battle. With cultural bias for this way of thinking, I can only hope a few less entrenched audience members can make the paradigm shift away from the “ghost in the machine” model. Your opposition in the debate will also believe that our 5 senses are not the sum total input of experience. They swear they get a direct line to “knowledge” through prayer though many will poopoo Edgar Cayce’s(sp?) osmosis (absorbing knowledge by sleeping on a book) as irrational. Ironic isn’t it, about what they’re willing to believe.
Have fun teaching those pigs to sing.
I’d love to go and listen. Google maps tells me the drive from Minneapolis to Morris is 2 hours and 55 minutes one way (172 miles)! Maybe not… :(
Blake, that has to be the best anime ever. Sure leaves Naruto, Inusyasha, Death Note, etc in the dust.
If anyone wants to carpool from Minneapolis and split gas money, I’m up for it.
That whole “ghost in the machine” attitude boggles my mind. How can they resolve that belief with changes in personality due to injury, mental illness, drug use, etc. I mean, if you change personality here on Terra, do you revert in
Seven Elevenheaven?Oh gee. The Lutheran MS is the abode of heretics, apostates, and blashemers. Just kidding. This is the fundie Death Cult version of Lutheranism. They are creationists and there are 2 million of them.
The Lutheran church has schismed so many times that it is hard to keep track of who believes what. As far as I can tell, the labels are meaningless these days anyway. There are 28 different Baptist sects.
How can they resolve that belief with changes in personality due to injury, mental illness, drug use, etc.
easy, it’s like driving a car, and say the power steering gets damaged so that when you turn the wheel right the car goes left. Damaging the brain is damaging the “control panel” the “soul” uses to control the body. The “soul” isn’t different but the conduit is.
Anyone else actually tried reading the Wiki info on Angus linked in the OP? If so, maybe they could interpret this para for me:
Nah, don’t bother. Just find it funny that an incoherent religious philosopher ends up with a pretty incoherent Evowiki entry. Maybe that’s all he deserves …
Huh? Why would he even discuss biology with Coyne, or debate Jarvis, if he thought that?
He can’t suppose their theistic conclusions are right, of course, and presumably would aver that this is mostly because the starting assumptions (indoctrination) are mostly wrong. But we might as well give up and become C.S. Lewis-impressed Platonists if there’s so little hope that “brain-damaged” theists might think things through anew–or better, that fewer children might in the future be indoctrinated with junk beliefs in the first place.
But if it comes down to neuroscience, indeed, that is the science with the most potential for damaging religion as a live option, since it leaves so little room for soul and some supposed God speaking directly to your “heart” or brain. Evolution is no help to religious notions, of course, but it does leave opportunities for unmarked interventions by God, “ensoulment” or whatever one might wish to believe. The more we pin down what the brain does, however, the Egnorian fantasies regarding a non-physical soul must involve an ever shrinking hope for this initially useless “hypothesis.”
Often I have thought that vitalism was the main goal of the IDists. They could never claim it to be “science” alone and hope the courts would believe them, though, so they had to attack evolution instead of faulting neuroscience directly. But they really hate the idea that the mind is simply the operation of the brain, because that strikes at the heart of most of their religious notions. Neuroscience is definitely something they hope to attack and destroy if they ever manage to seriously harm science in their bid for “freedom”–but of course history and sociology have always been attacked along with evolutionary science (Expelled is particularly egregious there).
They do know what threatens their beliefs–scholarship and empiricism in general. Yet I think they know that neuroscience is the most threatening piece of honest investigation out there, and getting rid of it is likely their highest goal, whether or not they realize it.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
You should pretend to be spontaneously convinced by an opponent in one of your debates. The yuks would be worth the confusion. Undoubtedly the argument that finally “convinced” you would be wholly without merit, but the cave dwellers would repeat it on the Internet as if it were a powerful spell for converting the unbelievers. Ah, now that would have made for an April Fool’s day.
Maybe Dawkins could come and you could have a Menuge-a-trois.
Isn’t the mind brain dichotomy just Dualism? Which died a century ago along with the Demon theory of mental illness.
Of course, nothing ever dies. Old ideas come back as zombies and ghosts and haunt the lunatic fringes.
The prevailing neurobiology paradigm is that the brain is a meat computer with a hardwired operating system left over from the Pleistocene. But it isn’t all bad, the human brain is also considered the most complex structure known.
If I were you (and I’m obviously not), I’d spend all my alloted time talking about Brain Ghosts. “Hello, I’m PZ Myers. You might think that being an evolutionary biologist is the most important thing in the world to me, but it’s not. It’s my personal relationship with the Brain Ghosts.” And I’d counter all of Menuge’s arguments by telling him that there’s something wrong with his brain that upsets his Brain Ghosts, and the Brain Ghosts are making him say crazy things. Crazy things like, “There’s no such thing as Brain Ghosts.” Then I’d show the Harvard “Inner Life” clip, and claim that it’s live video of Brain Ghosts in action.
All in all, it’s probably a good thing I’m not you.
Re #58 Glen D “But they really hate the idea that the mind is simply the operation of the brain”
Although a convinced materialst, I am also convinced that the mind is not “simply the operation of the brain”. The rest of the body, along with constantly shifting parts of the world beyond the body, also belong to the mind’s physical substrate – and this means that human minds generally overlap each other to a significant degree. The idea that each of us is (or has) an entirely self-contained and neatly-bounded mind or self is a hangover of dualism.
I had dinner with pastor Jarvis (he lives across the street from me) about two years ago. My favorite part was the ten-minute bit where he explained to his 10-year-old daughter that I was going to go to hell for being an atheist.
Quite the way to treat a guest.
Religious bigot. What is going on out there in Minnesota anyway?
Should have told him you were a Wiccan priestess. Could have saved yourself a pointless evening. LOL.
Everyone knows Myers doesn’t believe in “brain ghosts.” He believes ghosts are “the unconscious dreams of the dead.” Now I know what you’re thinking because I’m thinking it too: “Hey, Myers! How do you know ghosts ain’t the conscious dreams of the dead?”
I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t address this pressing controversy during his talk.
PZ, did you bother looking at Menuge’s CV before you jumped to the conclusion he’ll just drone out the usual ID crap? He’s not a theologian, he’s a philosopher who earned his doctorate at UW-Madison. Don’t underestimate him or assume blithely he’ll have nothing interesting to say.
If you have ghosts, you have everything.
‘sigh’ Here is the link.
A preview of what PZ Myers will do in the Lutherans’ Lair:
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2008/04/03/mary-beaver-octopus/mary_beaver_octopusjpg
;-)
Sorry Nan, but some basic figuring suggests otherwise:
a) Philosopher × (Convinced by CS Lewis) = PhilosopherStupid
b) PhilosopherStupid × Discovery Institute Fellow = (Nothing Interesting to Say × Extremely Irritating)2
If you’d been following along with the rest of the class, you’d have known this.
“The rest of the body, along with constantly shifting parts of the world beyond the body, also belong to the mind’s physical substrate”
Great. Now I have another reason to be pissed off at my neighbor for burning brush in his backyard.
Really? And computers might even be connected to, say, networks and power sources?
And so what if they are? If you’re a scientist, rather than a committed materialist (which does sound a lot like a religion, from you), you have to make an argument, rather than state a host of platitudes.
That is just mystical bullshit. That brains are in touch with each other through a host of cause-effect interactions is unquestionable. That’s why we have the “special senses,” as well as generalized sensing and information collection abilities. We communicate well enough, but even the people who think they “know each other” extremely well often find that there are remarkable separations between their minds.
I guess if you want to attack your strawman, you’re welcome to it.
That adult brains (minds) are primarily operating according to their own developed capabilities and “rules”, within a matrix of chemical and neuronal signals (if) within a reasonable healthy organism, is hardly in question. That brains are largely autonomous in many of their functions is also a given–again, supposing they’re getting the essentials (that’s necessary for computers as well, of course). The fact that brains are not independent of the body is also hardly in dispute–hence the evolution of brains, and self-medication with alcohol and other drugs.
Exactly how pseudoscientific you really are, I don’t really know. I do know that saying that minds overlap each other is nothing but religious-type twaddle, given what we actually know about the evidence of brain function.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Is there an explicit resolution and format for this debate? If not, poor Menuge could end up being shouted down by PZ and his stacked house of evangelical atheists and Darwin commandos, not having the chance to speak in an environment that was never intended to facilitate a constructive exchange of ideas in the first place.
The opposite is, of course, also a slim possibility.
“That is just mystical bullshit.”
No so. I have clear evidence of this brain/world interface – the feet.
Before we became “civilized,” people wore no shoes or at most thin-soled moccasins, and they were much more at peace and in touch with the world.
Shoe wearing cuts off the mind from its essential stabilizing parts. Hitler, Stalin, Manson… all wore shoes extensively.
I used to work at a customer service call center and this job required me to wear shoes. I was extremely stressed the entire time. I’ve since quit this job, no longer have to wear shoes and I find myself much more relaxed and happy.
craig,
you aren’t making a point yet. By extension, we should all run about nude. That’d be OK with me and my rolly-polly physique, but sometimes I need to supplement (i.e. I have no fur, and it gets cold out).
And I forgot – 10 Godwin points for you. If we’d only had active podiatrists, the Holocaust and those pogroms would never have happened. /eyeroll
Sirrah, I find your reasoning most compelling. If memory serves, Pol Pot also wore shoes. There should be a research grant in this somewhere.
The whole setup for this debate sounds like that last-minute-shifted-goal-posts radio “debate” from a few weeks back.
Regardless, I found their charaacterization of PZ’s position rather funny.
#75, lol.
PZ. No disrespect to Professor Menuge, but you can’t debate neuroscience and religious philosophy and resolve much. A more interesting debate, to me anyway, would be between a neuroscientist and a mystic –some one who has meditated for many years. Now sure enough, not all mystics believe in God, but some do and define their mystical experiences in that term.
Those must be some painful shoes for all them despots to go about killin’. Maybe there’s a way to also work in the J. Edgar Hoover cross-dfressing angle to show that all the world’s despots were cross-dressing, closeted gays wearing stiletto heels that killed their feet…
=|
I knew someone from Colorado like that. He was also missing all 10 toes. [Really, not making this up.]
Not sure what happened. Rumor had it that he got drunk and wandered out into a subzero night barefoot and eventually passed out.
True Bob (#52):
A couple friends of mine watched about eighty episodes of Naruto just because they wanted to see the main characters die.
The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod are serious evangelical whackos, a long, long way from the folks in Lake Wobegon. My family are not Christians (I’m actually not sure if my parents believe in any kind of god or spirituality or not, because it’s never come up), but at Christmas we sometimes go to a church service to sing carols. One year we went to one around the corner from us (this was in Maine), which seemed like a nice little country place. We made the same mistake, not knowing what Missouri Synod meant, and got treated to a fire-and-brimstone sermon that concluded with an invitation for recognized members of the church to come up for communion – BUT ALL YOU OTHER SUCKERS ARE GOIN’ STRAIGHT TO HELL!!!
Lori:
And you put up with that for ten minutes?
…as Pastor Jarvis understands it Myers believes that theists have something wrong in the way their brains function …
I dunno guys, it seems to me that this flyer pretty much proves the proposition.
Did you read his web page? He openly states – not on his personal page, the link for which doesn’t work, but his departmental page – that “I have studiously tried to avoid so-called real-world employment, but let myself down badly by working as a computer programmer in England for two years…” If he’s deliberately trying to get people to not take him seriously, he’s doing a good job. It’s also interesting to note that he’s “Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science”, an odd combination.
Blake Stacey
wow. I mean…wow. I can understand wanting to see their dooms, but sitting through more than one or two episodes…*shudder*
Re #86 “It’s also interesting to note that he’s “Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science”, an odd combination.”
Not odd at all: logic, epistemology, artificial intelligence are among the more specifc areas relevant to both. Google-scholar Pat Churchland, Aaron Sloman, Margaret Boden, Andy Clark and for that matter Daniel Dennett and Alan Turing.
will there be a podcast of this?
“and as Pastor Jarvis understands it Myers believes that theists have something wrong in the way their brains function that make them believe in God”
Well we could just ask PZ Myers what PZ Myers thinks but hell! Lets ask Pastor Jarvis instead! BYAAAH
Shoe wearing cuts off the mind from its essential stabilizing parts. Hitler, Stalin, Manson… all wore shoes extensively.
Posted by: craig
In these shoe? I doubt you’d survive!
testy
You must be confusing this site with UD?
FtK,
It’s “testes”
Did he know you were an atheist when you were invited? I am inclined to think that you were invited just so that he could preach at you sideways like that.
I have to admit, if I were ever in that situation, I would have been strongly tempted to smile sweetly, say “Why thank you Reverend, for this teachable moment,” and launch into a full logical and epistemological dissection of everything he had just said.
And as a further little twist to the knife, I might be tempted to add, “Do you know, Reverend, this is an astonishingly similar scenario to how I became an atheist — my parents told me that someone was going to hell for not believing as they did, and that individual made a fully logical rebuttal, which got me started on the path to atheism.” Except that would not, in point of fact, be true (for me, anyway).
#52
Debating Menuge actually looks pretty good compared to that list. :)
I humbly suggest you turn the “theists have defective brains” canard on it’s head and say that, in fact, theists’ brains work exactly as they evolved, go into a brief discussion of agent detection, theory of mind and all that, then use that to work into more hardcore neuroscience.
That’s some “framing” that works: appeals to the audience’s ego, is accurate (not misleading), and leads to deeper understanding of cognitive neuroscience.
Or, you could just sit down and shut up. Po-TAY-toe, po-TAH-toe. :-)
FtK, please, keep posting. I want a good disenvowelling. Here is a contest for you. How many untrue statements can you post here before the hammer comes down? But I ask that you try to have the posts on topic.
Yeah, but then, people with OCD never can take a hint.
Nemo:
I put up with it for two reasons:
1) It was amusing, he just kept paraphrasing the idea, “She doesn’t believe in God/Jesus, she’s going to hell.”
2)We hadn’t eaten yet,I was hungry, and I didn’t want to get kicked out for “trying to corrupt” their child. Most important: there was cheesecake for dessert.
RE #73 “I do know that saying that minds overlap each other is nothing but religious-type twaddle, given what we actually know about the evidence of brain function.
Glen D”
My, my, I have made you cross. All I meant by describing myself as a “committed materialist” was that I regard the idea of mind as a sort of non-physical “thing” or “stuff”, distinct from physical mass/energy as incoherent.
If you put someone in a sensory deprivation tank, their mind soon ceases to work effectively (they hallucinate, become incapable of following trains of thought, etc.), because the brain lacks the normal interaction with the world external to the body. You may have noticed that when you are dreaming, and this interaction with the external world is much more limited than when you are awake, reasoning is rather difficult. I don’t know about you, but I regard reasoning as a fairly important function of my mind. I therefore regard the parts of the external world I can perceive at any time, and particularly any parts I am using in thinking – such as the computer on which I’m typing this, a book or paper I’m consulting, handwritten notes or diagrams, or the brain of a colleague – as parts of the substrate of my mind. I could perhaps have expressed my meaning more clearly by saying the physical substrates of our minds overlap when we’re having a conversation, playing chess, having sex, or engaged in any other such complex social/perceptual/cognitive interaction – but unless you believe the mind is a sort of self-contained “thing”, distinct from its physical substrate – unless you are still stuck in a dualist framework, in other words – saying our minds overlap seems to me an acceptable alternative.
Cheesecake? Foul play!
Of course, that’s the same strategy missionaries have used for ages — “we’ll help you if you promise to kiss Hank’s ass for us.”
Maybe your ip address is different.
PZ, I’d suggest looking at the review someone else has mentioned at “Metapsychology”, Menuge’s response, and the reviewer’s rejoinder. Will only take 15 minutes. Know your enemy.
Whenever I see FTK, I think of BTK. Kinda creepy.
The physical substrates of our minds do not overlap during socializing, etc. Either learn what “substrate” means, or quit trying to dumb down those who do know what it means.
The obvious fact that minds are not physically separate from their surroundings is more or less built into our understanding of minds as brain processes. Indeed, the special senses in particular have evolved precisely in order to be causally linked with the environment, far more than would be necessary from the mere physics of a brain in a skull.
Physical systems (which themselves are mental constructs that help our mental processes to focus on specific issues) do overlap, of course, which allows for communication and various other inter-human and environmental interactions. Which means nothing to backing up a claim that our “minds overlap,” something that is as pathetically unscientific and sloppy now as it was previously.
If John Donne wants to say “our minds overlap, I have nothing against it, for in poetry it may be just a way of saying that “we” have come into a kind of harmony and/or synchronic way of thinking. But if someone thinks that the unavoidable and uncontested contextuality of brain and its processes merits the claim that “minds overlap” in a scientific context (and to oppose that to the reasonable, if not fully complete, notion that mind is the operation of the brain), coupling such nonsense to a rejection of dualism no less, such assertions can only be properly labeled as pseudoscientific tripe.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
It seems that FtK is the Ghost in the Machine today. Now you see her, now you don’t.
FtK – spooky action at a distance
And the Random Quote for me is so appropriate:
“A blow to the head will confuse a man’s thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.”
[Heraclitus, 500 BC]
PZ, you should make your opening statement include a rebuttal of their description of your position, and question the slanted way in which they prepared the description. Rather than bother to state your actual position, they caricature it.
Well she is supposed to be in the Dungeon. So when she pops on with a new address… that gets added to the list.
Maybe the ghosts are responsible for PYGMIES + DWARFS.
Good luck.
Re #106 “Either learn what “substrate” means”
I hadn’t realised you’d taken out a patent on the word. WordNet gives as one of the definitions: “any stratum or layer lying underneath another”, the sense in which I used it, as the brain, body and other parts of the world, metaphorically, underlie and support mental operations.
“But if someone thinks that the unavoidable and uncontested contextuality of brain and its processes merits the claim that “minds overlap” in a scientific context (and to oppose that to the reasonable, if not fully complete, notion that mind is the operation of the brain), coupling such nonsense to a rejection of dualism no less, such assertions can only be properly labeled as pseudoscientific tripe.”
Ah, so we are now agreed that the notion that mind is the operation of the brain is not fully complete. Good. That was my point.
If we’re “in a scientific context” (this is a blog on which anyone is free to post, and many non-scientists do, so I’d say that’s stretching it a bit), perhaps you’d like to give me your preferred scientific definition for the term “mind”? I’d have thought myself it was a term with multiple, vague and overlapping meanings, a bit trickier to pin down than, say, “brain”, but you appear to know exactly what it is, so perhaps you’d enlighten me.
Glen, having followed your weblink, I realise I’ve trodden on your pet theory. I do beg your pardon.
You can’t make this stuff up… unfortunately.
You’re too stupid even to understand what the point is, Gitt.
The whole point is that you’re a mystical cretin who thinks the mind as a “stratum or layer lying underneath another” overlaps with another one during socialization. As such, you’ve exposed yourself as a mindless pseudoscientist, whose subsequent efforts to redeem his brazen anti-knowledge only show further stupidity.
Of course I’m interested in actual science, rather than the ravings of an idiot. Only in that sense did you step on my project, which has absolutely nothing to do with foggy attempts to merge science with mysticism, and everything to do with causal classical science. Of course you didn’t back up your stupidity with evidence, since you don’t understand science in any visible sense.
But hey, why don’t you come back with more stupidity, so that your day will be complete? You sound like Kevin Miller and other addled buffoons who have only the haziest notions of science and of the language of science.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Nick, Glen can’t understand your position because his midichlorian count is negligible. He cannot perceive the substrate, that energy field created by all living things which surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together.
–Padawan Poe
Oh, so that’s where Elvis returned “home” to!
Oh, so that’s where Elvis returned “home” to!
“Nick, Glen can’t understand your position because his midichlorian count is negligible. He cannot perceive the substrate, that energy field created by all living things which surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together.”
I bet Glen’s wearing shoes, too.
So Nick’s position is magic!
For a second, I read the title as “Menage debate coming up”, which might actually have been more interesting.
Damn you, you’re always one step ahead of me!
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
“I spent 3 hours talking to a creationist cousin. Its so wearisome. She thought the bible was absolute truth, ignoring any argument or evidence I provided. :(….good luck!”
Well, you are trying to convert her using your own brand of absolute truth. What is the difference? One can be proven and the other can’t? Depends on how you view the word proven.
I see just as much ignorance and indifference than anywhere else right here. That is exactly why I call Atheism a religion, because you are out to prove the other person wrong and in your case that would be the so called science of evolution which has not been fully proven no matter what the author of this Blog says.
If Evolution was right, do you honestly think that so many people would challenge it? Most normal people don’t have a problem with most of science. Even a lot of non religious people don’t even follow evolution. Why are so many evolutionists athiests? Maybe because their so called evidence is from their specific view point.
Just like the KKK can take the Bible and change everything around and try to push their point of view. It is the same way, you can manipulate the evidence according to your own world view and your own point of view.
I don’t have a problem with Atheism, my problem is with this militant Atheism and being pushed is Evolution that is being used as a front to push Atheism down my throat and trying to CONVERT (yep, I said it) people. I see some of the evidence presented but it is from a very limited view point being pushed by scientists (which also happen to be all Atheists, now how did that happen).
Religion can do much harm and adding so called science to back it up and push it and evangilise it is where it becomes scary.
Science is a good thing and like I said before creates jobs and improves our lives. Atheism is fine and if you believe in that, that is fine. However, from what I see on here militant or Fundamental Atheism isn’t a good thing.
Yeah ok poptart.
If conversion is letting people know what religion is silly and is based on myths and lies… then yes we are trying to “convert” you. That you apparently don’t have the capacity to get it is sad. Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color or not stamp collecting is a hobby.
Go whine somewhere else.
And yet, aren’t you trying to do the same?
After all, if there are no absolute truths, then isn’t it an absolute truth that there are no absolute truths? Therefore, you too are trying to convert us to your religion of “no absolute truths”.
You should be ashamed of yourself, you absolute truth converter.
Since he has not claimed that the science of evolution has been “fully proven”, your statement is useless (the more technical debate term is “straw man argument”). Since evolution is part of science, not a “so called” science, your statement is nonsense.
Since there are perfectly obvious examples of people believing things that are not just not right, but obviously wrong, I honestly think that the “rightness” of a science is by no means clear to people. The fact that people challenge evolution does not mean that the science is wrong. And, since all of their arguments are flawed, it’s rather clear that it is the people who challenge evolution who are wrong.
QED
Because they both follow from thinking clearly, rationally, coherently, and consistently about the universe as we see and understand it.
That doesn’t mean that evolutionists can’t be religious. But it does mean that when they start thinking religiously, they are not quite as clear, rational, coherent, and consistent in their thinking about the universe.
Nonsense. The evidence stands on its own.
More nonsense. Have you ever even opened a biology book, you silly person? No-where will you find the words “And now that you have learned about the homeobox genes and DNA analysis, you absolutely must stop believing in your religion.” I mean really, where do you get such absolute rubbish?
Bah. I have no idea what you think “militant or Fundamental Atheism” even is, but if there is one thing that we’re militant against, it is false statements and nonsense propagated as truth, such as you’ve been doing.
Glen,
I recommend reading the early chapters of Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” if you want to understand why your “theory” of consciousness is so ludicrous. I await another volley of childish insults, to which I shall not bother to reply.
Incidentally, “git” has only one “t”. I recommend a dictionary.
Personally, I quite enjoy my many afternoons of sitting in my room concentrating on not stamp collecting
I have encountered Nick Gott’s type of misconceptions before. They are basically just a confusing of object and subject by misunderstanding recursion. They think that because we can think about thinking about the rock then the rock must be part of our minds. Which moves our minds out into, well the stars ultimately. It all goes downhill from there. Appeals to New Age mystical types.
wazza, what a great hobby. I prefer to not collect fine and rare Ferrari automobiles. Of course, if I had a Trophy Wife, I’d have to give that up.
Peter, sounds like a crowded variant of solipsism.
Re #129 Peter, since you respond to something you disagree with in a reasonable manner, I will try to explain my position, which has been comprehensively misunderstood – which may be my fault for the way I stated it. I am no sort of New Age mystical type whatever. A computer analogy, while not perfect, may be a useful starting point. I would regard the computer hardware as a “substrate” for the computations the computer is carrying out in much (but not exactly) the same way as I regard the brain as a “substrate” for an animal’s mental operations: a particular run of a program is wholly dependent on the hardware, but the same program could be run on a different computer, on the same computer with a different operating system, or be performed by hand moving marbles between matchboxes. In that sense, and that sense only, the program, and particular runs of the program, are distinct from the hardware they run on: we can make true statements about each that do not make sense applied to the others. Now, human brains and computers are by no means exact equivalents, and one of the ways they are not, is that the brain, via the rest of the body, is able to co-opt external hardware for its operations (there is of no reason in principle robots could not do the same). Consider how children use their “peripheral digital devices” (fingers) when counting. Have you seen film of a skilled abacus user calculating? Brain, eyes, hands and abacus are functioning as parts of a single calculating system. Ever taken part in a discussion group where ideas, diagrams, equations are scribbled on a board, or put on an electronic whiteboard, added to, modified, commented by a number of people? Problem solving, which I consider a mental activity, is going on, but it is not situated in a single brain: several brains, along with visual, auditory and motor systems of their owners, and external hardware, are acting as the substrate of this mental operation. Of course, much else will be going on in the brains and bodies of the individuals, which are not part of this activity – which is why I say that the individuals’ minds “overlap” rather than being merged. No ghosts, midichlorians, or angels jumping on and off pin-heads necessary.
Owlmirror,
you say :
“That doesn’t mean that evolutionists can’t be religious. But it does mean that when they start thinking religiously, they are not quite as clear, rational, coherent, and consistent in their thinking about the universe.”
I’m not sure if the scientists who were religious and have made important discoveries would necessarily agree with that.
Ken Miller, for example, asserts that a belief in God and in evolution are not mutually exclusive, but rather that they may intersect and, in fact, support one another.
So, I’d like to see evidence, that Miller is, as you say, not quite as clear, rational, coherent, and consistent in his thinking about the universe.
This is a honest question BTW.
Well, the theistic belief, when subjected to the scientific method, doesn’t hold up
there’s your proof they’re not consistent in their thinking right there.
So, Nick Gott, when you way our brains overlap, what you mean is that people can communicate with each other?
I am unwowed by this.
Re #135 I don’t say our brains overlap, Stephen Well, I say our minds do. Perhaps the distinction is too subtle for you?
Nick, I don’t see a particulary strong distinction. Without a brain*, there is no mind. Without the constant electrochemical activity in the brain, there is no mind. It sounds like you want to include all the things our senses convey to us as part of the mind. While there is definitely an interface, your prior use of “substrate” and “overlap” imply a stronger physical manifestation of brainiactivity (mind).
*”Brain and brain. What is brain?”
No distinction??
A brain is an organ–a physical object I can hold in my hand. In fact, I did so just yesterday (OK, it was a sheep’s). A mind, on the other hand (not “in” the other hand) is…a terrible thing to waste. No, a mind is just something a brain does to keep itself busy when not regulating homeostasis, gathering sensory information, and generating motor output.
Overlapping brains…that would be gross!
Sven, I meant I don’t see Nick’s distinction between overlapping brains and overlapping minds. I suppose I can imagine some disembodied brains overlapping, but I think the reference here is to functioning brains and minds. Without outrageous surgeries, and quite great risks for ruin, brains cannot physically overlap. Likewise, minds can’t really overlap either, unless you count “intuition” as an overlap (as opposed to “good guessing”).
However, they do go hand in hand (hah), do they not? Damage to the brain organ is damage to the mind. That includes physical and chemical damage, and even interface damage (e.g. torture, sensory deprivation, Stockholm Syndrome).
Or it could be dinner.
wazza,
I agree that the scientific method has not found any evidence for the existence of God(s) or life after death, or some of these other religious beliefs that the religious evolutionists may have.
But how do you show to them that these beliefs are not consistent with the world as we know it ?
Many of these religious scientists seem to believe that there are questions that the scientific method alone cannot answer, in other words, that faith and science are indeed opposed, but in the sense that the finger and the thumb are opposed, this is what enables us to grasp anything (Compton).
For example, why is this proposition inconsistent with the discoveries of science:
“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.” (Sartre, in his surprising end of life conversion from Atheism).
Re #137, 139 TrueBob, you are assuming what I am questioning – that the brain is the complete substrate of the human mind. I agree that having a brain is (at present) a necessary condition of having a mind, but for human minds in particular, parts of the world beyond the body are routinely, but very flexibly, used as long-term and short-term memory stores, perceptual aides, computational devices etc. Moreover, if you isolate the brain from these external supports, as in dreams or sensory deprivation, it soon stops working properly. I argue that a person’s mind – their capabilities to perform mental activities, tendencies to think and feel in certain ways and so on – rely not just on their brain, but on external hardware. I’d be devastated if I lost all the highly-structured information I’ve stored on the computers I use regularly, or in written notes, and there’s no way I could reconstruct it all from what’s in my brain. I’d also be seriously handicapped in many mental activities if I lost my glasses. From all these points, I argue that to identify mind with “the operation of the brain”, or even “the operation of the brain in the context of the rest of the body” is quite seriously incomplete. In fact, doing so leaves you open to the belief that brains or neurons possess some special sort of magic “woo”, the functions of which could not be duplicated by nonliving matter: the error into which John Searle falls, and if I understand his webpage correctly, our tantrum-throwing chum Mr. Davidson has also fallen (in his case, he seems to think electric fields are conscious).
To give one more example of “overlapping minds”, I must admit to using my wife’s brain as an external store for a lot of information about what we’ve done in the past, and are due to do in the near future. Similarly, she uses mine for information about current affairs: so to some degree, her brain is part of the substrate of my mind, and vice versa.
For an entertaining illustration of the concept, try reading Charles Stross’s Accelerando. Overall, the book annoyed me because he tried to cram so much stuff into it that any sense of story was lost, but it’s full of great ideas. The near future where people become reliant on their external computer hardware to the point that their identity becomes a melange of what’s in their heads and the computer they carry by their side was compelling — does anyone else sometimes feel that your mind has been diminished if you don’t have immediate access to google, or even the ability to do a fast global search of documents on your hard drive? And try taking a cell phone away from a teenager…!
Even without computer augmentation and relying solely on low-tech abilities like “speech” and “writing”, I think we can make a case that our minds are a bit more distributed than what is simply encased in our crania. The worrisome thing is that there’s a lot of slack in what you can use as an external store, and some people extend their minds by adopting crap like the Bible as their sole data archive. The guy with the laptop and the bluetooth headset is expanding his mind’s abilities in one direction, the guy with the well-worn bible that he carries everywhere is doing exactly the same thing, but in a different and dangerously screwy and limited way.
Nick, It seems we are talking past each other. To me, it sounds like you are expanding the definition of mind, beyond what I consider it. If you really consider those externals as part of ‘mind’, from my perspective you are advocating ‘woo’. The measurable and demonstrable activities of mind all occur within the confines of the skull. As for those externals, they may be helpers, but your mind is not lost without them – you could still have thoughts and conversations, you still retain your personality, you can still engage in problem solving.
As I said, I think it may come down to definition. I have lotsw of appurtenances, toys, reminders, etc that help me manage my way in the world, but I don’t see them as a part of my mind (as I define it).
regards
Re #143. Without any external aids at all (i.e. in complete sensory deprivation), the evidence is that thinking quickly becomes disordered, and people become extremely suggestible – that is, their behavioural tendencies change markedly: that’s why torturers use it.
Even without going to such an extreme case, do you ever:
Draw sketch-maps to find out if you know the way somewhere, or to generate instructions for someone else?
Draw diagrams to find out if some mechanism you’ve thought of could really work?
Sort objects into piles according to some criterion?
Write down arithmetic calculations (and by the way, try multiplying, even on paper, using Roman numerals).
There are reams of cognitive psychology experiments on these “measureable and demonstrable activities of the mind”.
Nick, I see those things as outputs of the mind, not part of the mind. I don’t see them as different from other mind-driven actions like running, walking, cooking, etc. All are performed by providing commands to muscle groups. Does a blind person need to draw a diagram or map?
While sensory deprivation is a very interesting topic, I don’t see it advancing your argument. By my standards, Helen Keller was pretty sensory deprived, but she was not apparently mad. Certainly going from a world with sensory input to one with no sensory input is a huge environmental change, but how do we address the mind that is not sensory deprived as a change in condition?
(Roman number system is hysterical – I am so used to a zero and a positional number system to do mathematics effectively, although apparently you can use knotted cords).
RE #145 “Nick, I see those things as outputs of the mind, not part of the mind. I don’t see them as different from other mind-driven actions like running, walking, cooking, etc. All are performed by providing commands to muscle groups.”
The difference is that the diagram, map, whatever is being produced and used specifically as a cognitive resource. In any case you have not answered the point that cognitive psychology systematically investigates how different types of map, diagram, arithmetic notation etc. make problem-solving of various kinds easier or harder – i.e. they scientifically investigate these “measureable and demonstrable activities of the mind” – your phrase.
“Does a blind person need to draw a diagram or map?”
There are maps, diagrams etc. specially designed for blind people, which have raised contours. Again, there’s a whole literature on cognitive aids for the blind if you’re interested.
“By my standards, Helen Keller was pretty sensory deprived, but she was not apparently mad.”
Who said “mad”? But until she had a teacher who could communicate with her through touch, and who could teach her how to interact systematically with the world via that sense, she was pretty much completely incapable and unmanageable. It’s also worth noting that she was not deaf-blind from birth. (Children who are now get intensive specialist education, but I believe there are still many cognitive skills that don’t appear directly dependent on vision or hearing which they have trouble acquiring. Again, there will be literature on this, but I’m not familiar with it.)
There are also cases of people with problems transfering information from short-term to long-term memory who rely on leaving notes for themselves, and some recent work has investigated the benefits of giving them a head-cam and replaying what they have done, speeded up. Without such aids, these people would suffer more severe loss of personal continuity and identity than they do.
Of course if you want to you can insist that no activity of the mind can rely on anything outside the skull – mind is a natural-language term and if we want to bring it into science, there are multiple ways of doing it – but then you’ll find that a lot of psychology is not about the activities of the mind.
Re #142 Yes, I enjoyed Accelerando. A lot of the “Singularity” crew think people will “upload” from their brains to computers. If anything like that happens, I think it will be much more piecemeal: first, specialist perceptual, motor and cognitive aids for people with specific conditions; along with detachable “thinking caps” that help you with particular skills, then more general aids for people with dementia, Korsakov’s syndrome or whatever – and in the end, we’ll find someone is brain-dead – but still “there”. Of course, if our tantrum-throwing chum Mr. Davidson is right, they’ll be “zimboes” in Dennett’s terminology: behaviorally just like us conscious human beings, but with no inner lives, because they won’t have the right electric fields. Scary, eh?
Mmmm, I may have to adjust my paradigms. And I’m so comfortable with them. ;)
Glen,
Again you show what an annoyingly stupid prick you are. I have read it clear through, dumbfuck, and was completely unimpressed, well before I came up with my ideas. He explains nothing about consciousness there, as nearly all scientists (not low-grade retards, like yourself) recognize. But you’re too damn stupid even to recognize that you’re committing the fallacy of appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam), hence you’re too stupid even to addres my ideas.
I recommend that you learn to write above the level of third-grader, fuckwit.
Why should you reply? You came in demonstrating what a stupid fuck you are, and you’ve only compounded the idiocy you embrace, from IDist-type resort to authority, to your absurd beliefs in overlapping minds and overlapping “substrates.” You are retarded.
And by the way, I’d respond to you with more than insults, if you could write anything above the abysmally stupid. It’s like with the IDiots per se, I only insult them because they, like you, are too stupid and too prejudiced either to address anything intellectually, or even to write an intelligent question.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Incidentally, “git” has only one “t”. I recommend a dictionary.
Dear fucktard,
It has two t’s, and is capitalized, when it refers to you.
I recommend that you find yourself someone who can deal with retards like yourself. I can’t. Then again, this isn’t the place for retards to come asking for help for their inability to write, to think, to understand insults, to deal with science, or with their incapacity to address evidence.
Go to UD. They’ll probably think you’re brilliant.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Ah sheep’s brains, not only are they yummy when pan fried (illegal to eat here in the UK sadly) but they are excellent teaching aids due to the general non development of cortex relative to ourselves.
I have been half responsible for dissecting one whole and two half human brains (I did Physiology AND Anatomy) and it is DEAD BORING cutting carefully through all that identical cortex so you don’t miss the basal nuclei.
Then when I was a PhD student and teaching in my spare (Hah!) time, brains became scarce and had to be reserved for the Medical Students (along with the lecturers who could still actually teach). So the Physiology Dept of which I was part decided that sheep being the same mass as humans so all the ‘reptilian brain’ was the same size etc was just fine for teaching physiologists, you don’t need to dissect a human brain to do surface anatomy after all. This being New Zealand, sheep’s brains were not hard to come by ;-)
I can confirm having helped teach the relevant labs that it is a lot quicker and easier to find the relevant nuclei in sheep and that a sheep hippocampus looks just the same as a human one. Only the large olfactory bulbs are really different.
Being able once again to eat sheep’s brains is one reason I look forward to returning home (no scrapie in NZ). Though I remember ordering it in a restaurant around the time I was doing the above teaching, cut nicely in coronal section too. I had to hurriedly smother each slice in sauce to stop myself identifying the structures…
Only by distorting what is usually meant by “mind”.
Try to make a case for it (you haven’t come close, only fogging over the issues), PZ, and I mean without misrepresenting normal meanings of words.
Given that you won’t (make a case), you fail. I have no idea what you have against precise meanings, or disciplines like cognitive science and psychology, that you have to endorse poetic and/or vernacular representations as if they belong in a scientific context.
If you mean that the mind is not properly characterized as (part of) the processes going on in the brains (which is where Gitt began his dumbfuck attack), say so, and you’ll instantly be known as a pseudoscientist (and no, making arguments about the CNS (maybe even PNS) and brain don’t change anything–when we’re more careful, we tend to speak of the CNS and not just the brain). Say otherwise, and it’s clear that you’re just screwing around with words. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but that’s hardly to your credit.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Nick@#132
Your analogy of the abacus user nicely highlights the problem with your concept. I agree that mind/brain, hands and abacus are part of the same system. However that system is not mind even though mind is part of it. This is like saying your car is all engine.
For one thing there are synapses involved where the motoneurons make the muscles that move the fingers work which show where mind stops. In fact Steven Hawking shows that mind needs the body only very, very minimally. Though not presently technically feasible the heads in jars that came from Matt Groening’s mind illustrate this nicely. Is Steven Hawking’s mind diminished by the fact that his motoneurons no longer work? Clearly no.
To do what you are trying to do you stretch the concept of mind to breaking point, for one thing it no longer has explanatory power, it points to nothing as a concept. I suggest you invent or coopt a new term. MetaMind or something instead of risking the sort of minsunderstandings you have got in here.
Glen,
I’ve been abusing my opportunities, reading on your site. I can (so far) buy into your model*, but I want more clarification (please don’t demand I buy your book).
How does your model cope with RFI? We have EM fields all over the place, some of them not so small. How would consciousness (if I get it, interaction among the nerve-generated EM fields) be affected by larger external EM fields?
What role do neurons/neurotransmitters play in your model? There certainly is information moving there, and chemical interference or damage definitely affects consciousness.
*Actually, I find your logic pretty reasonable – but then I *am* an engineer. ;)
No, I have my sites mainly for the sake of informing, not for selling. Sure, the book is linked (why not?) to a site that sells it, but that’s just because I can. I’m not sure if the book is as up-to-date as I like anyway.
I think that RFI is particularly not a problem, since EM radiation traverses electric and magnetic fields without much affecting it or being much affected. The model does not rely upon radio waves or any other EM radiation.
The larger external EM fields no doubt will penetrate the skull and have some effect on brain activity (high AC fields apparently do affect the brain somewhat, and I’ve read that, under certain conditions, even MRI magnets can). But two small magnets within a large magnetic field (MRI, say) will continue to attract or repel in largely the same manner as in the absence of a strong field, provided they are reasonably close together. And the chemi-electric activity of the brain is not greatly affected by close proximity to powerlines either, because the fields driving ionic activity in the brain are quite non-uniform on the small scale, while by contrast the external fields are nearly uniform on the small scale.
I always believed that, if consciousness were the result of electric fields, the interactivity of information would have to be short-range and small-scale. Initially I thought so because long-range interactivity of information in the brain (via electric fields) would simply create noise in the electric field. However, it appears to conveniently take care of the problem of EM fields (which I believe is, or has been at least, a problem for Pockett’s, McFadden’s, and John’s EM models), which would distort any consciousness dependent upon long-range interactions.
The only likely forces strong enough to matter in an electric field consciousness would be short-range anyhow, since the strength of electric fields drops off so rapidly, and are not large to begin with (the EEG signals detectable outside of the brain are due to synchronized discharge of thousands of nerve impulses).
The synapses would operate exactly the same way, and even the action-potentials would only be nudged slightly in relationship to each other. I am one who believes that consciousness is far more caused than causal, although I cannot accept that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon (Chalmers), since consciousness has to agree with the laws of thermodynamics, and what is affected by something in turn affects it. I see the interactions occurring via electric fields (experienced as consciousness) as allowing for “self-ordering” between related nerve signals.
Oh yes, there is plenty of information moving there, and it apparently is the same information as that held in consciousness (so far as we can tell, anyway). This is why I think that consciousness has to be part and parcel of the neurophysics of the brain, which the electric fields (responsible for opening voltage-gated channels) are, without question.
Chemical interference or damage do affect consciousness, in my model, because they affect the generation and continuation of the electric fields which are partly what constitute the encoding and communication of neural information.
*Actually, I find your logic pretty reasonable – but then I *am* an engineer. ;)
That’s nice to hear, although I’m not sure how to take “but then I *am* an engineer.” In any case, engineers typically understand the physics of these matters, while I’ve found that even some neuroscientists do not (these particular people know about voltage-gated channels, but not what voltage really means).
Anyway, I hope that was helpful.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Thanks Glen. I’ll ponder on this some more.
The engineer disclaimer is because all too often I get embarassed by engineers who pitch woo – i.e. ID endorsements from engineers.
WRT EM fields, you’re saying that once you’re past near-field effects, and at small scales, the gradient is relatively small (more or less constant on the scale of brain or neuronal activity)?
That is how I understand it, yes.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Re #153 [Peter Ashby]
“Your analogy of the abacus user nicely highlights the problem with your concept. I agree that mind/brain, hands and abacus are part of the same system. However that system is not mind even though mind is part of it. This is like saying your car is all engine.
For one thing there are synapses involved where the motoneurons make the muscles that move the fingers work which show where mind stops.”
They show where the nervous system stops. Dennett describes in Ch.3 of “Consciousness Explained” the experience of being blindfolded, and handed a stick, pen or pencil, and touching various surfaces with this: if you do it for long, it can feel as if you have receptors at the end of the stick.
“In fact Steven Hawking shows that mind needs the body only very, very minimally. Though not presently technically feasible the heads in jars that came from Matt Groening’s mind illustrate this nicely. Is Steven Hawking’s mind diminished by the fact that his motoneurons no longer work? Clearly no.”
I’d thought of using Stephen Hawking as an example myself. First, keep in mind he did not become ill until around 20; how does a mind “get started”? The human infant has some cognitive capacities, but absolutely requires interaction with the physical and social worlds, and with externalised and communal forms of representation (all human cultures have them) to develop properly. Returning to Hawking,
would his mind not be diminished if he had not had his wheelchair, communication aids, and human assistants? In fact, isn’t that strange, monotone voice now part of his personality? My wife is a speech and language therapist who specialises in finding and programming the right communication aids for people without functional speech (none of them on Hawking’s level of intellect and many very minimally functional). Particularly in the latter cases, these appear to serve to give them a sense of agency they had not had before. Heads in jars – fine, so long as they have functional equivalents of sensory and motor systems. What if you take it a bit further, and start replacing bits of the brain with artificial systems – perhaps starting with the hindbrain and working from there. Does the mind retreat each time you replace a chunk?
As for terminology, I’d say “mind” “points to” memory, sensation, emotion, imagination, skills, personality, sense of identity etc., not to a physical object or system. Of course a mind must be dependent on some physical system, and as a matter of fact all these things currently depend on having a brain, but there is nothing necessary about this connection, and it is far from clear it is sufficient. Suppose you could extract a fetal nervous system, keep it supplied with all essential nutrients, but give it no sensory inputs? Do you think it would develop a mind? If it did, it would surely be radically different from any existing human mind. People used to think the heart was the seat of emotion – did that change the way they thought about emotions very radically in everyday rather than scientific contexts?
I will in future be careful to explain what I mean more precisely, but it’s not my intention to avoid stirring up people’s ways of thinking about things: the assumption that we are all entirely autonomous, self-created minds or selves, “owning” bodies, has important political implications. Occasionally of course, you come across someone who thinks an insult is an argument, but I can cope with that.
Actually, all too often one encounters a stupid Gitt like Nick, who ignores all arguments, and focuses on the insults that one uses to try to get something into his mindless head. Just as the IDiots do, and for the same reason, they have nothing intelligent with which to respond, so they mischaracterize the responses they’ve been given, whingeing that they’ve been treated like the stupid shits they are.
But he’s too damn dumb to deal with any real issues (he ignores, or misrepresents, the arguments I make, in order to maintain his mindless twaddle), so he lies, again, and again, and again. He can’t admit that he’s a worthless piece of shit, even though he demonstrates it with each and every post.
By the way, lying fuckhead, you said you’d ignore what I wrote, though you couched it in insults (fucking hypocrite). Then you didn’t ignore it. Even in the simplest matters you can neither maintain any facade of intelligence or of honesty.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
For some reason, I am reminded of truth machine vs. Neil B flamefest, with the zombies and so on. But then, I sometimes perceive patterns that are, hm, not necessarily actual.
Nick is far more sensible in his arguments, I think. This is clearly not any sort of dualistic apologetic, but seems to be the more interesting question of whether the mind can be considered in isolation from its inputs and outputs, and if not, can mind be considered to extend to external tools used by the mind? I don’t see this as having any simple answer.
A similar question: Can a neural network be considered in isolation from its inputs and outputs?
Since I’ve been reading The Ancestor’s Tale, I am also reminded of Dawkins’ description of the extended phenotype (the argument that an animal’s phenotype can be considered to extend to everything in its environment that it affects; the classic example that he offers being beavers and their lakes). There’s also the suggestion of the argument between taxonomic “clumpers” and “splitters” — at what point is an animal population sufficiently different from another population to be a different species? And another of Dawkins’ digressions involves the oversimplifications imposed by discontinuous and Essentialistic thinking.
Hm. Anyway, it’s a question from a very interesting perspective, I think, and will require more pondering.
OK, so you’re stupid, Owlmirror.
I didn’t accuse him of dualism, he accused me of it, even though it’s so much gibberish that he has to back up even his “overlapping minds” nonsense.
But since you are too incoherent and idiotic yourself even to understand the basics of Nick’s accusations and stupidity, I’ll leave off.
Learn to read and think, Owlmirror, instead of stupidly adding to the false accusations.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Re 161# Owlmirror
“Can a neural network be considered in isolation from its inputs and outputs?”
Good question, I think. I used to work in AI (starting so long ago that I was trained in the “GOFAI” (Good old-Fashioned AI) symbol-manipulating system era of the ’70s. The focus of research shifted to neural networks and evolution-based approaches, then to some extent to “Behavior-based AI” and robotics, which took the role of the external world in cognition much more seriously.
“Since I’ve been reading The Ancestor’s Tale, I am also reminded of Dawkins’ description of the extended phenotype”.
Of the Dawkins I’ve read, I think “Extended Phenotype” his most original (Selfish Gene was brilliant, but largely based on work by Hamilton and others). One way of expressing another aspect of the view I’m trying to formulate is that human social groups (to a lesser extent, some other animal social groups) have a collective and cumulative extended phenotype. Crucially, important parts of this can be drawn on by individuals or groups, as cognitive resources.
Because there has been an effort to confuse the issue of what a mind is, and more than one person has fallen for the fogging up of meaning, I’d like to include a recent quote representing the scientific understanding of what “mind” is:
In other words, I’m pointing out what is the case, and simply giving an example. I can give another example, of course (actually, I could, but won’t, find many examples). I wouldn’t generally turn to Daniel Dennett for an example in these matters, especially because he’s no scientist, however I can attest that he does understand the scientific position on what “mind is”, and since Nick Gotts brought him up, why not?
So, here’s Dennett, stating what I did in the first place:
Thanks Glen. Keeping my pair o’ dimes.
Do you care to say why Little Nicky so gets under your skin?
He doesn’t so much, he just started out with nonsense, and then he kept on compounding it with false accusations, irrelevancies, and misrepresentations of settled science.
The fact is that it is very tiresome trying to deal with people who bring up junk that confuses the issue in the first place, and which is used as the basis for illegitimate attacks in the second place. I really do not see why one should countenance such nonsense, or to treat it like it is meaningful, and I typically dismiss it when I do encounter it.
Many times they just go away when that happens. Which is excellent. Some just go on and on like IDists or other clueless dolts, confusing people like Owlmirror who don’t trouble to find out what actually did set off a dispute (or don’t care, or perhaps can’t understand it at all).
Above all, the problem here is much like dealing with IDists. Someone like myself uses terms and meaning in the normal manner in science, and someone else having a false notion of both terms and the meanings used in science, makes a false accusation, like Gotts did in the first place. One could either to explain science using the reasoning of philosophy (which has a lot to do with how terms and meanings are used in science) and science–and usually they neither understand nor care about the points brought up, but simply repeat the same wearying tripe in a slightly different manner. Or one could attempt to get rid of the nonsense by a few cogent explanations and a dismissal of the attempt to distort the use of terms and meanings in science.
I tried the latter in #73, as a shortcut, but this time it wasn’t a shortcut, nor did Nick or Owlmirror pay attention to the issues I addressed there. For that matter, PZ went for the muddled notion of what “mind” means, rather than the standard meaning in this context, which didn’t help at all (no one really disputes what he said, except that it’s a very loose and vernacular (at best) sense of “mind” that he used there, not what is normally meant by it in science discussions–nor even in most philosophy discussions–since science and philosophy seek to sharpen distinctions where possible and to avoid such overbroad concepts).
The truth is, I don’t know why a simple generally accepted statement of science’s understanding of mind (and of course I knew that it was Dennett’s as well, or I wouldn’t have sought out the statement from him which I quoted), probably the clearest and best meaning of mind in the view of science, would generate a senseless attack over “dualism” (“The idea that each of us is (or has) an entirely self-contained and neatly-bounded mind or self is a hangover of dualism” (as I noted, it’s a strawman, and the fact that causality courses across and between mental systems is neither surprising nor an excuse to say that minds overlap)), when my position is as far from dualism as science gets (I won’t say it’s “monist,” since that has implications I find questionable). The fact is that it’s tedious nonsense, and an entirely unwarranted misrepresenation of my position, something that no one with anything to add would even consider writing.
These are not really issues in science, nor are they issues in the matter of discussing science. The fact is, I don’t know why anyone would not react dismissively, when the entire accusation was baseless and unscientific in the extreme.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Perhaps I should say one more thing in the hope that the subject will soon be closed, which is that “mind” tends not to be used all that much in neuroscience writing anyway, notably because science typically considers “mind” only to be the result of brain, or anyway, the result of part of the brain processes (is the brain’s thermoregulatory function part of “mind”?).
However, “mental,” which is both etymologically related to the word “mind” and typically considered to deal with the same subject, continues to be used a good deal in science. Thus, I think it’s fair to say that the issue of what we mean by “mind” is not unimportant, nor ought we to let established meanings be clouded by relativistic attempts to co-opt such meanings.
Convention rules in the matter of science meanings, just as it typically rules meaning of nearly all words. Meaning is lost when one decides simply to use whatever notion is convenient for a person, something that seriously afflicts the “discussion” of ID vs. evolution.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Actually, I realize that I should amend that.
While the gradient of the outside EM field matters, certainly, it is entirely possible that the gradient from the external field could be rather larger than the gradients involved in nerve conduction, without affecting the operation of the nerves much at all. The point being that if, say, two positive fields involved with action-potentials are interacting, the external field is going to affect them in nearly the same manner, while the forces between the two positive fields associated with the two action-potentials will continue to be nearly the same, vis-a-vis the interaction of the two local fields.
The gradient of the external field would have to affect interacting nerve fields differently in order to change that interaction, with respect to the two local fields. This probably means that an external field would affect electrical activity involving two opposite charges more than it would electrical activity between two similar charges.
Since action-potentials probably wouldn’t change too much during the encounter with the high-intensity external electric field (they might change shape, due to interactions of opposite charges being affected by the external field, but I assume that the roughly same spiking from negative to positive and back again would still exist), a significantly higher gradient from the external field would not be likely to affect interacting local fields all that much, because the local similarly charged fields would affected nearly equally to each other (and the chemical component of the action-potential would tend to provide the “force” holding the fields of the action-potentials back against the external force).
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
TrueBob,
I am of course aware that my view is a minority one, but since I take (as Dennett does) a functional view of mind – that it is the sum of an entity’s mental capacities and tendencies – it is more consistent to regard mind not just as “what the brain does”, but as “what the organism does using its brain and any other information-processing resources”. In the human case, this often includes substantial parts of the external world, including other humans. I do indeed consider “The idea that each of us is (or has) an entirely self-contained and neatly-bounded mind or self” a hangover of dualism. To say something is “a hangover of dualism” is, of course, not to say that it is dualism; any more than to say: “This headache is a hangover from the party last night”, is the same as saying: “This headache is the party last night”.
I look upon mind as a particular sort of programming for the brain, that can make it act in certain ways; it’s connected to Stewart, Cohen and Pratchett’s idea of Extelligence, and can be imbued upon any brain by bringing it into regular contact with functioning minds, but once it’s in, it can act alone by using the world around it as part of its extelligence, as in Nick’s idea
Glen D I have just had a peruse of your website and I noticed you invoked the name of McFadden, Johnjoe I presume. I wandered into his website a while back and thought I would see from my neurophysiologist perspective and engineer background (Father and both Grandfathers) how he went.
It all looks just fine and dandy, except, not once does time enter into it. There is in physiology the concept of the Time Constant, which is the time a moving electric field will decay to the point whereby it is too weak to stimulate a cell/axon node to fire. If you look at the spacing of the nodes of Ranvier along myelinated axons you find that they are spaced so they are JUST inside the distance you compute using the tme constant, the axon diameter and the condctances and voltages. Thus the cell minimises the numbers and thereby maximises the conduction velocity. So you see it is a real, computable property. Nowhere does McFadden employ it or hint that he has employed it or is even aware of it. He does loads of calculations too, but nothing to work out if these electrical fields are strong enough to actually have the effects that are being claimed for them.
It isn’s empty space that these fields are moving through either, in between all those nicely parallel Purkinje cells is not empty space. There are some smaller neurons in there but primarily that space is filled to bursting with glial cells. Not spectacularly excitable cells, but they still generate a field due to being polarised.
I think that schema like yours and McFadden’s are doomed to failure, this is for one simple reason. Biology is messy, applying engineering principles will only get you so far in biology and any shema like this which simplifies to the extent you and McFadden do will not fly. Biological systems are not like things we engineer where parts, systems etc can be considered separately. Bones are not simply structural struts and fibroblasts and glia are quite probably the most important and functional stuffing materials you can possibly conceive.
Re #169 – I’ll have to have a look at Stewart, Cohen and Pratchett! How serious is their book? I like the term “extelligence”.
Nick Gott @#158 I have done some considerable amount of fine dissection and I too can sometimes seem to feel through my ultra fine forceps. But I only SEEM to. To jump from this to your suggestion that what must be happenning is that my mind is in some real sense extending out from my fingers to the tips of my Innox #5a’s is just silly. Ever heard of illusions Nick? phatom limb pain? or even just Escher? THAT is what is happenning in those situations.
If you wish to postulate otherwise in any meaningful way then you will need much, much more than words to convince me. If you are using it in any other way then it is not meaningful since anything can be mind, the rock I see that reminds of something etc, etc, etc. Thus the concept is useless since it simply says anything can be anything.
Re #172 Peter Ashby. Consider your comparison with phantom limb pain: the phantom limb is not there, so it cannot be playing any causal role in perception, nor can it be used to gather information. The stick is, so it can.
To greatly simplify what I was getting from Nick:
Man is the tool-maker. The tools are part of the mind.
A pretty loose description there.
From Glen:
As conventionally assigned, mind is what the brain does. Here are some possible descriptions of how some features interact.
Very interesting and technical topic. I would expect we are a good ways off from understanding how the brain works, but at least there are clear efforts to model and understand the vastly complicated interactions. Chemicals and electricity interacting in a non-homogeneous media, with very very fast activity across non-trivial distances. And beyond that, it’s all squishy and gross. :)
Re #172 Peter Ashby. I take external objects to be part of the mind’s “hardware” (perhaps a better term than “substrate”), when and to the extent that they are being actively used for as information-processing resources, for storage or transformation, rather than merely perceived. So the first time the rock reminded you of something (let’s say it looked a bit like a particular person), it would not belong to the mind’s hardware; but if you then picked it up and kept it to remind you of something in relation to that person (say, that you had promised to contact them), it would so belong. Of course this is going to be a matter of degree, so if we adopt the viewpoint I am advocating, where, or indeed whether we choose to draw boundaries around the mind’s hardware would be a matter of choice, and context-dependent. But this I do not see as a problem, particularly given that “mind” refers to things we do or that happen to us – to events and processes rather than objects. Events and processes have spatio-temporal locations but in many cases, their boundaries are not exact.
Nick you have ignored the main thrust of my objections. What work does your perspective do? what new and more importantly useful or insightful things does this viewpoint open up? What meaningful work does it do?
You have failed to address this question and unless and until you can satisfy those questions I see no reason to address or bother with formulations of this type. As far as I can see it all just sophistry. Enlighten me as to the mind or go away and burble meaningless nothings elsewhere.
Re #176 Peter Ashby.
First, it is not for you to tell me where I may or may not post, nor am I in any way answerable to you. If you don’t want to “address or bother with formulations of this type”, then don’t.
Second, I have fully answered the substantive points in your only recent post (#173), before #176: I dealt with your “phantom limb” comparison, showing that it was misconceived, and with your “reminiscent rock”, specifying when and why I would consider it part of the mind’s hardware. You have not queried either of my responses, so I assume you find them satisfactory. If not, please say why.
A full answer to the question you now ask, about what useful or insightful things this formulation opens up, would require a full-length paper, which I do not currently have time to write. I came to this viewpoint myself during and after work on human wayfinding for my D.Phil, and a postdoc studying the web-construction techniques of spiders. In earlier posts, I have pointed to some of the areas of cognitive psychology, cognitive social psychology and the design of communication aids, that study problem-solving which employs external information-processing aids and/or involves several people at once. Other areas I have not mentioned include human-computer interaction, cognitive and social anthropology, the study of non-human animals’ construction and navigation techniques (particularly those of social insects but also spiders, beavers, birds, etc.) the history of technology, particularly information technology, and organization science. I can supply specific references if you wish, but I’m sure you can find many for yourself.
I believe the explicit recognition that well-integrated information-processing or problem-solving systems are not confined to single nervous systems should assist the discovery of underlying principles of the functioning, and the evolutionary or historical development of such systems. This remains to be proved, and although to some degree relevant, this area is not the focus of my paid work, to which I must now return.
Re #173 Peter Ashby. Incidentally, you might at least try to get my name right. It is appended to each of my posts. You could use the occurrence in the post you are replying to as an external part of your mind’s hardware, by cutting and pasting, rather than relying on your brain for this evidently difficult task.
It depends which part… I’ve only read their science of discworld books, which use a short story set in the discworld universe to illustrate real scientific concepts. The book is divided into alternating chapters of science and fantasy, but the science is quite serious and covers a lot of ground fairly well. Extelligence is mostly covered in the second book, which deals with the evolution of the mind. It’s quite a concept, and it draws you in quite well. Definitely makes you think.
Nick, by extending your analogy, aboriginal man uses spears to hunt prey. The spears are part of the mind. A printer and a modem are part of a CPU, QED. Info tech is a relatively new field, and cannot possibly yet have affected the evolution of the mind. A tool is a tool, an aide to accomplish a goal. The goal and the idea for the tool originate within the mind, still inside that skull.
Things like diagrams, equations, etc are things that can be held within the mind. Their real use is as a form of communication. They are static references, not part of the mind, which is really really not static.
It’s also a dishonest representation of my position, lying cur. If you weren’t a complete fuckwit, you’d not keep lying well after your lies have been exposed.
I treat you no better than the IDiots, because you’re as dishonest and ignorant as they are.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Re #174, 180
TrueBob,
Not all tools, just information-processing tools.
Spears, when thrown, are not being used as part of an information-processing system: they are not a cognitive resource. On the other hand, if a youth is learning to make a spear, and has an existing spear made by an expert in front of him, that is being used as a cognitive resource, hence is “part of the mind”. Printer, modem and CPU are all hardware: I am NOT saying the spear, abacus or whatever is part of the brain. Both the goal and the idea for the tool may arise solely within the brain (at least so far as the actual moment they are conceived is concerned), but either or both may instead be suggested by something in the immediate external environment. In this case, I would not say the goal-suggester or tool-suggester is part of the mind at the time it is perceived, but it may become so if it is then used as a cognitive resource. For example (and of course this is speculation), consider how length-measuring tools may have originated. When it became useful to measure distances on the ground, in constructing a hut or dividing up land, people presumably paced them out. Someone may then have noticed that a length of rope (which would have been a very early invention), happened to be just as long as their pace, or the distance they had just paced out. Ahah! We can use that as a standard length! What’s more, if we knot it at regular intervals…
Things like diagrams and equations can be held internally to some extent, but this can be very hard to do, and the more complex the task, the greater the need to externalise them – even if you are not going to show them to anyone else. You may be particularly good at visualisation, but most people, for example, find mental 3-D rotation difficult. Even as simple a task as:
Imagine a cube.
Now, imagine orienting the cube so that you are looking directly down on one corner, with the opposite corner directly beneath the one you are looking down on.
Where are the other corners? Do you really “see” them clearly, and as quickly as you would using a real cube?
Again:
Imagine two equilateral trianges, of the same size, lying flat, side by side, but with one rotated 180 degrees relative to the other.
Now imagine sliding one across, without changing its orientation, so that a vertex of each lies in the middle of a side of the other. How many triangles are there in the combined figure? Is doing it internally as easy as drawing it?
Again: try dividing 3759 into 665238103 in your head. Maybe you can do it, I certainly can’t – and the external representation is not static as you solve the problem: you are modifying it all the time.
Why do you think architects and engineers spend years (or used to – all done with CAD/CAM software now) mastering technical drawing? Partly for communication, yes, but even if they were undertaking a one-man project, such drawings would be essential. Moreover, where diagrams etc. are used in communication, they can be acting as parts of a well-integrated cognitive system whose hardware includes parts of several brains, the diagram, pencils, etc.
By the way, I also tend to use “information and communication technology” in a non-standard sense (though not without warning people), to cover anything designed to store, convey or transform information: everything from middle Palaeolithic hand-axes (some of which, given their symmetry and beauty, are likely to be status-markers – i.e. to convey information – as well as or even instead of, practical tools), through cave-paintings, writing systems, systems of mathematical notation, paper, spectacles, telescopes, scientific instruments, printing presses, the telgraph, telephone, photography, mechanical calculators, Hollerith cards – right up to ICT in the narrow, modern sense.
Get it right. I disagree with him, I do not invoke him.
Furthermore, I do not think that you did notice any mention of McFadden on either of my websites, as I’m fairly sure that his name is not there. Where did you come up with this idea?
And what would this have to do with my ideas? Your fantasy that I invoked McFadden has nothing to do with me, nor do I have anything to do with McFadden’s explanation of “free will” and other fantasies.
And?
That may have something to do with McFadden’s ideas, which happen to be rather esoteric and fanciful. I’m only interested in, you know, actual fields associated with action-potentials.
So it’s true, action-potentials do propagate. I had no doubt that they did, but thank you for pointing that out again.
Um, yeah, great, we agree, McFadden doesn’t really have anything there. Now quit confusing myself with him.
Yeah, omg, it’s not a vacuum in there, or a space filled with air? Gee, why did I say that it was that way? Oh, I didn’t? OK, then what is your point?
I never was pretending that the illustrations were photos, nor that consciousness is due to Purkinje cells. I was just pointing out that many neurons do parallel one another, illustrating it so that people will think in terms of interacting action-potentials across parallel neurons.
Yes, in my earlier website I even mention glial cells as a possible go-between for electrical interactions. It’s not what I think is most likely, but I really don’t need you lecturing me because you haven’t read what I’ve written, but merely have assumed without evidence or reason.
It’s very simple, in the sense of lacking in understanding.
So, now you imagine that I’m bringing engineering applications to this matter. Really, where do your fantasies end?
Yeah, uh, I know that, and I mentioned any number of complications in my book. Oh, you don’t know that? But you’ll misrepresent everything I have written in your ignorance, and fault the strawman that you built.
Now that you’ve shown that you know a little bit about biology–God knows why you think it’s relevant–why don’t you tell me something I don’t know.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Nick, all I am getting from you is your concept that communication is mind. You provided some rather recently developed problems. Here’s a more real world issue:
A gazelle is running from your left to right. It’s path is 20m from you, and it is going 60kph. Since you can throw a spear at 120 kph, and gravity accelerates downward at 9.8 m/s/s, where do you aim your throw?
Well you don’t go through all that nonsense. That’s information, and of no use in the instant. Instead, you just look and throw based upon your experience. And with practice, you nail that sucker every time. That is the mind, taking those raw sensory inputs and working those muscles, without all the analytical BS.
That is the environment in which our brains and minds evolved, not some environment where we needed to calculate and convey complex activities/actions/directions.
Re #184 TrueBob
In your example, you’re quite right. But suppose you don’t see the gazelle, but gazelles’ trails? You use that to work out which way they’re going, how long ago they passed, how many, how big, whether there’s a pregnant female, whether any are sick – but so far, that’s just educated perception. However, you may well want to teach your son to make these discriminations – the trail becomes a teaching aid. You point out the differences and tell him what they mean (by this time, I’m assuming we’ve got at least rudimentary language). Anyhow, it’s getting dark, too late to follow them now, and we’re in an area we don’t know well. (If it’s an area we do know well of course, we’ll already have a set of landmarks and standard paths.) How are we going to find the start of the trail again tomorrow? I know, we’ll make sure we leave a good trail of our own on our way back to camp! Oh dear, we’ve got to go over these bare rocks. Pick up a handful of pebbles and drop one every few yards.
When we get back to camp, we ask the oldest hunter, who can’t hunt any more but knows the country well: where are the gazelle likely to go, could we get ahead of them. He draws a map in the sand. (Maps of this kind are known among Polynesians, Inuit and I think many other non-literate cultures. We might not be able to make much sense of them, because the mapping conventions are different.)
When we retire to our corner with the wife, we fancy a bit of how’s-your-father. But she’s doesn’t want to get pregnant (it’s a poor year), has been making notches on a stick to keep track of her cycle (what may well be such records, on bone or antler, exist from the European Upper Palaeolithic), and says no.
I could go on. However, even if you were right about the environment “we evolved in” (which of course was many different environments, and we’re still at it), once culture gets going, our minds change even without genetic change. Sorry – got to go for supper. I’ll resume later or tomorrow.
The “ghosts in the brain” thing sounds like the sort of risable (and at the same time detestable) quote-mining we have all come to expect from Ben Stein et al.
I hope someone videos all or part of this “debate.” For some reason unknown even to me, I take a masochistic pleasure in watching these things.
Nick, I meant “evolved in” in the sense that we didn’t have all these fine IT aids.
To me, all those things are merely communication. Once planted in a mind, they know where to go, don’t have to have the map redrawn, etc. As I see it, these are all still tools that you are trying to make into part of the mind. In fact, Polynesians made little navigation maps of sticks and shells and twine, that show how the ocean swells in places, etc. Incans kept track of commodities on strings with knots. That doesn’t make those things “mind” If you lost those things, you do not lose your mental faculties, or even the ability to reproduce them.
TrueBob,
Briefly, things like maps you have made, Inca quipu (the knotted strings – the name just popped into my head) etc. are functionally equivalent to brain-stored long-term memory, except that they can be shared. You can’t necessarily reconstruct the specific examples if you destroy or lose them – this is functionally equivalent to losing something from your brain’s LTM (I think the opinion among experts is that generally when such a memory cannot be recalled, it’s still there, but the search for it fails – except maybe in dementia). Maps, diagrams, etc. can also act as extensions of the brain’s working memory system, to hold, combine, sort or transform aspects of something you are trying to work out. Indeed they have some advantages if anything spatial is involved, as the use of an external space imposes some consistency constraints automatically. If you ask people to specify the distances and directions of several places in a city from each other, when these places cannot be seen from each other, you are likely to get a set of answers that are not internally consistent. If you ask them to put the relative positions on a map on paper (or sand), they may still be wrong, but they must be consistent with Euclidean geometry.
The other point I had just started making last night was that:
(A) There’s little reason to think our innate mental faculties are any different from those of our ancestors 80,000 years ago (and maybe considerably further back).
(B) Devising and using external cognitive hardware appears to be universal across cultures.
(C) However, once this process gets going, it has strong cumulative tendencies: generations can build on what their predecessors, or for that matter other cultures, devised.
(D) Consequently, the minds of modern human beings, particularly but not exclusively those living in industrialised societies, are very different from those of people living 80,000 years ago (we have faculties, and probably emotional states, which they did not, and vice versa) – although if you could bring an infant from that time into an industrialised society, their mind would develop in a “modern” way.
I’m very willing to continue this discussion, either here or offline (my email address isn’t difficult to find), as I’m finding it very useful in refining my ideas. However, if I can resist the temptation, this will not be for a few days as I have work I get paid for that I must finish! Thanks very much for your interest.
Okay then Glen D tell me how the eletrical field from one neuron stimulates an AP in an adjecent one with the space filled with glia? Give me the calculations I can handle them and I could do with a laugh.
Ever heard of insulation Glen? We humans may think we figured it out but long before Intel discovered that you can only miniaturise things so far nature faced the same problem and invented insulation to prevent exactly the sort of scenario you are proposing. Don’t tell me to read you book, cite some experimental evidence.
Peter, are you saying the brain is a non-conductor? Air is a pretty good insulator, but we have radios, don’t we?
“What did you learn at Phyrangula today, wazza?”
“Well, today I learnt that if you get scientists discussing the nature of the mind, THEY GO FUCKING CRAZY!!!“
I see you’re still fucking straw-whores, jackass.
I have never once said that the electrical field from one neuron stimulates an AP in an adjacent one. Didn’t I tell you, stupid old man, to quit confusing me with McFadden? Apparently you’re too addled to be able to tell anyone apart any more, and dishonesty becomes you, so you’ll fuck away at your own pathetic illusions, all the while thinking that you’re dealing with what I’ve said.
Learn to read, moron, and a little honesty wouldn’t hurt as well.
Tell me how to prevent electric fields from one neuron from affecting APs on the other. That’s all I’ve ever claimed, and you’re too stupid to get even the simplest things right.
Go ahead and laugh, it’s your mindless straw-whore that you’re laughing at, idiot.
Ever heard that neurons aren’t insulated, dumbfuck? It’s essential that unmyelinated neurons be uninsulated, so that the voltages can open the voltage-gated channels. But then you don’t get the simplest things right, like who said what, so I could hardly expect you to understand science.
I’ll tell you first of all, you can’t even write an intelligible sentence. God you’re dumb!
And apparently you think that brains operate like computers. As stupid as you’re proven to be, I really didn’t think you were quite to the point of drooling idiocy, but apparently you are.
Furthermore, since I never proposed what you claim I did, I certainly am not going to try to back it up. It’s just stupid, as stupid as McFadden’s model, and your incapacity to read anything right.
Believe me, I don’t want you to read my book. You’d just make stupid comparisons between brains and computers like you did above. Yesterday your straw-whore was that mine was an engineering solution, today you demonstrate that that particular lie was a projection of your idiocy.
Go off and read something you can understand, Dr. Seuss or something on that level.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Even myelinated neurons are uninsulated at the nodes of Ranvier, of course.
Just had to tidy that up, since I wouldn’t want to leave any opening to anyone who attacks as stupidly and dishonestly as Peter does.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Your debate with Simmons was great! You had him asking you for info to read up on. LOL. Wow, most of these ID guys don’t even know what they’re talking about.
Not as impressed with the Menuge debate though (but who am I to criticize, I’m not up there).
Menuge seemed to know what he was talking about.
I think it wasn’t a good idea to debate him any. People don’t really even know who this guy is. He’s a prof at some University in nowhere wisconsin call Conordia (sp). I guess Dr. Ruse liked his book, but Menuge is a non-factor.
Why struggle in a debate with someone that no one really knows? IDiots will just say, “ha, Menuge isn’t even a big presence on our side and you struggled with him”.
But, you debated Simmons and made him look foolish. And Simmons is MUCH more recognizable on the ID side.
I’d say stick to ripping apart the recognizable IDiots, don’t even bother with a Menuge.
Hey, I happen to have spoken to quite a few practicing neurologists in a meeting in Chicago last week who are also dualists. See, for example,
http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Mind-Critical-Study-Consciousness/dp/0691023603/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209001370&sr=1-1
for Penfield’s discussion.
Have fun tearing up your straw man caricatures. The real action is elsewhere :).
Dr. Myers you should have taken this debate more seriously.
Demand a rematch and go in there with some more interest next time.
It’s like when watching UFC and you know your guy can easily win, but he’s not taking the intiative and seems to be elsewhere with his mind.
If you did this half heartedly because you think Menuge is just a crock, please say so.
Or post some rebuttals on your blog. I subcripe to the believe that a debate never ends. Truth is truth whether it is said in the actual debate or after the fact. I think it would be a wise thing to do to find transcripts of the debate. Read Menuge’s “points” over again and post replies to them here.