. . .but its made of lots of tiny robots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0wetQwH9nY&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div

Love Dan Dennet's work.

A very good presentation of your basic materialist/mechanistic view.

But I’m not convinced. The main reason is illustrated by my disagreement with this …

When I close my eyes and look at a mental image picture of a cat, I’m not looking at me, I’m looking at the picture. There is “me” and there is “picture”. I am what’s looking at the picture.

I see no reason to “move beyond that” and simply discard, out of hand, the fact that it is an accurate description of the situation.

But if Dr. Dennet wishes to do so, then he’s perfectly welcome to.

I guess the most I can say is that it just doesn’t explain what I have observed and experienced to my satisfaction.

Is it just me, or is he exceptionally boring? I mean, I LOVE the things he lectures and writes about, but it's almost a chore to watch/read.

Dennet is equating soul to the little man, just as you equate the driver of the car to the little man.

You are saying that the car is the body, and the driver runs the body - but in the designer thread when Shoku questioned you about having complete knowledge of how the car works in order for the driver to have created and contol it, you balked. Why?

When you/the driver, want to see an image of a cat, how do make the brain show it to you the driver/little man?

I don't recall that particular question being asked, nor do I remember "balking" at it. So I can't really say why it appeard that I balked at it.

Well first off, remember that I don't believe the picture is stored in the brain.

So, simply put, the picture is viewed by deciding to view it. That's all there is to it. Just the same as you would think of a "human being" deciding to look at a painting. There is nothing that "shows" the painting. It is just there (having been created and hung there previously). One decides to look at it or not. And one views a spcific picture out of many by simply deciding on which picture to view.

I guess you could say that the mind (not the brain) "shows" the pictures by painting them and hanging them for viewing. But that's the closest thing to "showing the picture" that the mind does.

So what does the brain do if not store images, or impressions, or interpretations, or any content at all . . .

Basically, it operates as a switchboard for routing neural signals. But it doesn't "store" anything - except possibly in the sense that persistent connections could be considered as being "stored" connections.

So my spirit knows the smell of dog poo?

I couldn't say what "your spirit" knows. I don;t even know what "your spirit" is.

But I know the smell of dog poo. And since I am "a spirit", then, to phrase it in the third third-person, the spirit that is me knows the smell of dog poo.

Interesting videos. I disagree completely, but it's interesting.

The most interesting part is at the end when he says that when we encounter something wonderful, our first instinct is to give thanks, even if there is no one responsible to thank.

So if invisible magical spirit sauce can permeate all of reality and send signals to brains that are just switch boards, then why have a brain at all, brains are expensive ours uses 12 watts of continuous power which from a metabolism stand point is EXTREME. Why all that when spirit sauce can send signals anywhere? Why not have the spirit sauce skip all the BS and send the signals needed to move my left toe directly to my left toe from the spirit sauce dimension???

Why have brains at all if all there are is switch boards, a switch board would be much less expensive and really redundant if signals could come from outside of reality, why would it need to enter brains? Why have a central hub when the fastest route is a straight line?

This is called looking at the real world and applying what we do know against your theory, and seeing if it sticks, so far it looks bad.

It seems your theory cannot explain physiology really at all.

You where in programing so you know what an algorithm is I shouldn't need to go into what the functions of algorithms are, but they do serve a purpose and are needed to carry out instructions, switch boards only need very simple algorithms, we can literally watch the brain light up while processing information, the amount of processing does not lend credibility to your assessments, this is the most simple of analysis we could do and it already looks bad.
If all of the processing where used merely for motor functions then we could test by simply have the person do nothing but think, and we should see little or no activity if no physical functions where being called, but that's not what happens. In fact motor function uses very little of the brain while depending on the particular mental action, it goes nuts . . .

Its really a for gone conclusion that your wrong, our current understanding of the brain is light years past the point where we can accept a dualistic view.

I think I sent you that book by Dan Dennet didn't I? Did you read it? Its actually quite old now, and does not have the latest and greatest research but its considered a classic in the community because his analysis of epiphenomena is spot on even today, and has revealed powerful explanations for all kinds of experience based, and quite weird phenomena that is shared by all normal mentally functional adult human beings.

The brain thinks, this is easy to see, especially when you can trick it so easily and uncover the pathology that allowed the trick to work, research does this, its been going on for 20+ years, but in the last 10 the cognitive scientists have made a lot of headway.

OH MY - my bad, I had not considered that memory was not stored in the brain. Wow - off site storage no back up required. Cool.

That does present other questions though. Between the body and the mind (mind being the controler or the little man)which is actuaually seeing? In other words is the eye just a mechanism feeding the information to the controller?

The the body is defective, say it has defective cone cells in the eye like color blindness or just damanged cones - is the picture the controller sees and stores altered by the effects of the damaged body part?

I think the discussions about “the universe as a game” (in the Evidence for Designer” thread. Cover that fairly well.

But to summarize it here, the best I can reply is: I don’t know why you chose to have a brain. You’d have to tell me.

Well I agree that any theory looks bad when starting with a diametrically opposed fundamental premise.

And really, I have no problem at all with looking at what you call “the real world” in order to understand how it works. Science is the beast way to do that. That’s the way “the real world” is set up. Gaining an understanding of “the real world” a necessary process in being able to operate within it. No argument at all with that.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that “the real world” is the be-all and end-all of everything.

I agree that it certainly does not explain it to you. But it explains it well enough to me for my requirements. It explains to me why physiology even exists in the first place, which science does not and cannot do.

That may very well be true. I have no way to refute it. So the result is that you assume that the observed brain activity is the processing and I assume that the observed brain activity is a byproduct of the processing. I don’t see any way to go forward from there.

Yes, I think “forgone” is the perfect word for it. So I guess you’ll accept whatever forgone conclusions you feel most comfortable with, and I will accept the one’s I feel most comfortable with.

I don’t have a problem with that.

One could just as well say that your current understanding of the brain is light years behind where you can accept a dualistic view – and getting farther and farther behind because it is intentionally headed in the wrong direction.

I didn’t get it, but I was looking forward it. So if you feel like sending it again I’d appreciate it.

Well personally, I can only say that I have had experiences that indicate to me that thinking goes on without a brain present. And I am perfectly aware that “modern science” would label those experiences as delusions or hallucinations, as it does with virtually any and all “paranormal phenomena”. But to me, that’s simply another example of the dogmatic denial that has been the bane of scientific advancement throughout all of history.

Let’s see…

First let me clarify something about my philosophy.

The “little man” is me. The “body” is…well…obvious. The “mind” is separate from both. It contains the “file cabinet” for mental image pictures, which includes recordings of perceptions and things that are “imagined”. It is also contains the “computer” that does calculations, comparisons, etc.

And as with any formation gathering system, the information obtained is subject to the limitations of the information gathering system used to obtain and record it.

So to answer your questions, yes, damaged cones in the eyes would affect the image recorded (provided, of course, that the eyes were the system through which the perception was received). And what is actually “seeing” is the “little man” and not the “mind” or the “body”. (Now of course one could say that an eye or a camera is “seeing”, in the sense that it is processing input. But I think you know what I mean when I say that the person is “seeing”, not the camera or the eye.)

Now let me presume to take that a step farther and explain something regarding where I think that is likely to lead…

The “ocular system” is not the only system by which “visual” images can be perceived. An example would be the “visual” perceptions recorded during remote viewing.

Couple points to add:

Just to nit pick, 12 watts equals less than 11 Calories. You say constant? But it cant be constant. Do you mean 12 watts per second? minute? hour?

Also information is stored in the brain. Look at split brain patients. Individuals who suffer from sever epilepsy sometimes undergo having their corpus callosum cut. Which is the bank of nerve axons that connect one half of your brain to the other. Normally you wont see a difference but If you blind fold the eye connected to the half of the brain that controls speech and show them an everyday object to the other eye. They cannot tell you what it is, but they do know what it is and sometimes the half of the brain that saw the object will attempt to communicate with the other half using movement (kinda like charades).

Point is half of the brain knows what the object is and the other half doesn't. If information was not stored in the brain and it was the spirit handling memory, cutting the corpus callosum would have no effect.

That’s not the way I would interpret that.

According to what you said (“they do know what it is”), there was no impairment of memory.

So it looks to me like the cutting of the corpus callosum did not affect memory at all. Apparently all it affected was some relationship between a sense perception (sight) and a motor function (speech), which seems reasonable to me since those are both bodily functions.

Also, just a note regarding the idea that memory is localized within the brain (i.e. different memories are stored in different locations) – as I understand it, and unless there has been some contrary findings since then, Dr. Karl Lashley pretty much conclusively refuted that idea about eighty years ago.

Now as I said before, I’m not saying that nothing is “stored” in the brain. The simple fact that connections are made and become persistent could validly be called “storage”. But I don’t believe those persistent connections have anything to do with self-determined analytical thought or memory recall. I think of them as being equivalent to something like a scar – the byproduct of a physilogical reaction to external stimuli.

I understand what he is saying about our soul being made up of tiny little robots. These things that make up our body each have their jobs to do and are each programed (somehow) to do them. They each have smidgen of intelligence, or perhaps memory or consciousness because that is all they have the capacity for. They all work together to maintain the whole.

I heard that our bodies are virtually a universe of living bacteria, some good, some bad. Tiny creatures live out their lives in and on our bodies. Compared to us, they are seemingly "mindless" as he said.

But I disagree that they are truly "mindless." They may not be very conscious but they are certainly not completely mindless. I think as they all group to form our bodies that they become a group mind and that mind grows as a unit to manifest the "soul" he is talking about. That is, it manifests the unified thing that we call our own mind.

Of course I am speaking of the physical body basically, which has its own mind.

These bits and pieces that come together to form matter and our bodies are part of an intelligence that arises from elsewhere. The universe perhaps. Like droplets of water will come together to form the body of a pond, lake or ocean teaming with life.

Our bodies are mostly water. According to evolution, we crawled out of the sea.