On Oct 5, 10:39 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> If you are right then there would be a violation of physical law in > >> the brain. You have said as much, then denied it. You have said that > >> neurons firing in the brain can't be just due to a chain of > >> biochemical events. > > > They can be due to a chain of biochemical events, but they also *are* > > biochemical events, and therefore can influence them intentionally as > > well as be influenced by them. I don't understand why this is such a > > controversial ideal. Just think of the way that you actually function > > right now. Your personal motives driving what *you* do with *your* > > mind and *your* body. If the mind could be understood just as > > biochemical events among neurons, then we would have no way to think > > of our bodies as ours - the brain would not need to think of itself in > > any other terms other than the biochemical events that it literally > > is. Why make up some bogus GUI if there is no user? > > The mind may not be understandable in terms of biochemical events but > the observable behaviour of the brain can be. > > >>That would mean that, somewhere, a neuron fires > >> where examination of its physical state would suggest that it should > >> not fire. > > > I guess you are never going to get tired of me correcting this > > factually incorrect assumption. > > > The physical state of a neuron only suggests whether it is firing or > > not firing at the moment - not the circumstances under which it might > > fire. If you examine neurons in someone's amygdala, how is that going > > to tell you whether or not they are going to play poker next week or > > not? If the neurons feel like firing, does a casino appear? > > Whether a neuron in the amygdala or anywhere else fires depends on its > present state, inputs from the neurons with which it interfaces and > other aspects of its environment including things such as temperature, > pH and ion concentrations. If the person thinks about gambling, that > changes the inputs to the neuron and causes it to fire. It can’t fire > without any physical change. It can’t fire without any physical > change. It can’t fire without any physical change.
“If the person thinks about gambling, that changes the inputs…” Start there. “If a person thinks…” means that they are initiating the physical change with their thought. Their thought is the electromagnetic change which drives the physical change. The thought or intention is the signifying sensorimotive view, the electomagnetic view is a-signifying voltage, charge, detection of ligands, etc. It is bidirectional so that the reason for firing can be driven by the biochemistry, or by the content of a person’s mind. This is just common sense, it’s not disputable without sophistry. Here’s how I think it might work: You can be excited because you decide to think about something that excites you, or you can ingest a stimulant drug and you will become excited in general and that excitement will lead your mind by the nose to the subjects that most excite it. They are the same thing but going in opposite directions. Think of it as induction: Imagine that this works like an electric rectifier: (http:// electrapk.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/half-wave-rectifier-with- transformer.jpg) except that instead of electric current generating a magnetic field through a coil which pushes or pulls the magnetic force within the other coil - the brain’s electromagnetic field is pushing to and/or pulling from changes in the sensorimotive experience. The difference though is that with a rectifier, it is the identical physical ontology which is mirrored in parallel (electromagnetic :||: magnetic-electric) whereas in sensorimotive *the ontology is perpendicular* (meaning that what it actually is can only be *experiences linked together through time*, not *objects separated across space*), so there are four primary mirrorings: electromagnetic :||: sensorimotive (3SI) - brain changes induce feelings sensorimotive :||: electromagnetic (1SI) - feelings induce brain changes magnetic-electric :||: motive-sensory (3MI) - mechanical actions induce involuntary reactions and motive-sensory :||: magnetic-electric (1MI) - voluntary actions induce mechanical reactions Note that the motive inductions are about projecting to and from the brain, body and it’s environments while sensory inductions are about receiving sense from the experiences which can be consciously decoded from the environment, body, and mind. Think cell/body+dendrites vs axons, brain vs spinal cord, head vs tail. Many vs one. Motive projects intention actively through obstacles and objects like a magnet pulls iron filings into shapes and magnetizes other iron objects to make them magnets. Sense interprets and experiences, detecting though analog and metaphor, reproducing local versions of remote phenomena. In the objective sensory induction (3SI) 3-p electromagnetic changes (cocaine hydrochloride binds at dopamine sites) induce complementary changes in the corresponding 1-p sensory fields, (the psyche as a whole is compelled to feel animated and driven). In the subjective sensory induction (1SI) 1-p sensory events (guy thinks about skydiving while getting sexual with the girlfriend) induces change in 3-p electomagnetic fields (testosterone, dopamine, and epinephrine are released). Both of these are cases where feelings and physical changes are produced (either with electromagnetic cocaine binding or sensorimotive fantasy), but I’m calling it Sensory Induction in either case because the significance of both; the effect that we are producing is ultimately a conscious experience. If it were not for the possibility of the conscious experience, we wouldn’t care about the effect of cocaine on the brain any more than we would chalk dust. It wouldn’t matter. In the case of subjective motor induction (1MI), 1-p motives and intentions induce the electromagnetic changes in the corresponding neural pathways from the brain down the spinal cord to the efferent nerves to the muscles which move the finger actively. This need not involve conscious thought or sense-making at all. It is a dumb command which can be simulated in the muscle or the brain reflexively with a live electrode or TMS. That reflex automatic response would be: Objective motor induction (3MI). So there is no magic, it’s just that experiences over time cannot be translated directly into objects across space. They are perpendicular ontologies, but they share a common sense. They share a where and when but the who and why doesn’t have to care about the what and how, and the what and how aren’t even aware of the who and why. Them materialist monist position is blind to 1-p causality, so it looks like magic that a person can contract the muscles in their arm just by doing it. It has no language for who or why, so it fails again and again, struggling in vein to find some pseudo-why hidden behind the complexity of the what and how. I am giving you a language to transform that problem into a new and exotic hemisphere of cosmology, which has soul or psyche, but it is NOT soul or anima. It is sensorimotive phenomenology. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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