Human, mutant, cyborg, android, robot?

[Bradski]

You only agree with me 100% because you haven’t understood what I wrote. So that 100% agreement, like the rest of your responses to my posts, is nothing but a smoke screen thrown up to mask an inability to grasp what I have written.

Ah, I love this forum…

 

[GEddie]

I agree with you 100%. The mind is the activity of brain. It cannot exist without the neurons. An exact analogy is the “legs” - the material substance, and the “walking”, the immaterial activity of the legs. There can be no “walking” without the legs. But the “walking” needs no “spiritual” explanation.

Well, apart from walking requiring life and will, which some will say are spiritual (dead legs don’t move, and live legs won’t move if there is no will to use them); walking is a fully physical process. Stride length, sound of footfalls, heat of muscular action, nervous activation of muscles, precession of the head, oxygen uptake in the lungs, displacement of the body center of gravity, etc, can all be measured and the movement of a walking body accurately described.

The mind is not physical to anywhere near the same extent. Brain activity can be traced and oxygen uptake monitored, but the mind cannot be described by these parameters.

ICXC NIKA

 

[MPat]

Of course not. Obvious things do not need to be spelled out.

Very convenient! In that case I can say that you have effectively admitted that your position on, um, something, is wrong, the explanation how you have done that is obvious (thus it doesn’t have to be spelled out), and I am not interested in hairsplitting and discussing it.

It is almost a pity that the claim of being “not interested in hairsplitting” is actually rather close to such admission…

I guess there isn’t much left to discuss, unless you rediscover your interest in hairsplitting.

 

[Pallas_Athene]

Ah, I love this forum…

Yes, it is quite fun.

Well, apart from walking requiring life and will, which some will say are spiritual (dead legs don’t move, and live legs won’t move if there is no will to use them); walking is a fully physical process. Stride length, sound of footfalls, heat of muscular action, nervous activation of muscles, precession of the head, oxygen uptake in the lungs, displacement of the body center of gravity, etc, can all be measured and the movement of a walking body accurately described.

That is true, but the “walking” is still not an ontological object. And that does not make it “spiritual”. The whole point was (and still is) that materialists do not deny the immaterial aspect of reality. Abstract concepts, attributes, relationships, activities are all “immaterial” in the sense that they are not ontological objects.

The mind is not physical to anywhere near the same extent. Brain activity can be traced and oxygen uptake monitored, but the mind cannot be described by these parameters.

Well, you oversimplified it. Due to the complexity of the brain (billions of neurons) and the number od connections among those neurons it is beyond our capabilities to create a “map” of the processes. But that is just a technical difficulty.

We already know that thoughts can be mapped to certain parts of the brain activity. Not just we can see the neural activity due to the stimuli, but the reverse is true, too. Exciting the proper areas with mind electric current or well chosen chemicals will produce the same result. If you burn your finger, the proper parts of the brain will register it as pain. Conversely, exciting those neurons, will also register as pain, without the actual burning.

That shows the one-to-one correspondence between the physical activity of the brain and the working of the mind.

I guess there isn’t much left to discuss, unless you rediscover your interest in hairsplitting.

I have no problem with hairsplitting, if there is a “hair” to split. But the difference between the abstract, axiomatic, deductive system and the concrete, inductive, objective reality is simply obvious. No need to spend time on it.