On 03 Oct 2011, at 01:08, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Oct 2, 7:00 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/2/2011 10:14 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Oct 2, 9:28 am, Stathis Papaioannou<[email protected]> wrote:
So you do believe that ion channels will open without an observable
cause, since thoughts are not an observable cause. A neuroscientist
would see neurons firing apparently for no reason, violating
physical
laws.
Thoughts are observable to the thinker. No physical laws are
violated.
When a person thinks of gambling, the associated neurons fire for
that
reason. The firings have a proximate cause - changes in voltage or
polarity, etc, but those phenomena also are activated because the
person who they are part of thinks of gambling. Both the thought and
the mechanism are part of the same thing, a thing which has it's
only
existence as the dualistic relation between the two.
If they are part of the same thing, then it is presumptuous to say
one causes the other.
One might at well say the neurons firing caused the thought of
gambling - and in fact that
is what Stathis is saying and for the very good reason that a
little electrical
stimulation, that has no "thought" or "sensorimotive" correlate,
can cause both neurons
firing AND their correlated thoughts. But thoughts cannot cause
the electrical stimulator
to fire. So it is *not* bidirectional.
What do you mean? Thoughts *do* cause an electrical detector to fire.
That's what an MRI shows. You could use any kind of electrical probe
or sensor instead as long as it is sufficiently sensitive to detect
the ordinary firing of a neuron. That's how it's possible to have
thought-driven computers.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129889/scientists_show_thoughtcontrolled_computer_at_cebit.html
I agree with Craig, although the way he presents it might seems a bit
uncomputationalist, (if I can say(*)).
Thoughts act on matter all the time. It is a selection of histories +
a sharing. Like when a sculptor isolates an art form from a rock, and
then send it in a museum. If mind did not act on matter, we would not
have been able to fly to the moon, and I am not sure even birds could
fly. It asks for relative works and time, and numerous deep
computations.
When you prepare coffee, mind acts on matter. When you drink coffee,
matter acts on mind. No problem here (with comp).
And we can learn to control computer at a distance, but there is no
reason to suppose that computers can't do that.
Bruno
(*) My computer put a read line under that word :)
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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