₦airaland Forum

HardMirror:
you are instructing me as my dad or my school teacher?

Both.

InSenze1:
Both.

lol.

HardMirror:
you are instructing me as my dad or my school teacher?

You really think this is an intellectual topic? Hehehehe
Keep waiting, I will come and help you dissect the cock and bull tale of the boy who died for 20 minutes. What a joke

Bingo! Just as I thought! You have not been reading through - and yet you lazily comment without knowing what you are commenting on. I have not said a single word about the story of the boy with the purported NDE. Not a word.

InSenze1:
Bingo! Just as I thought! You have not been reading through - and yet you lazily comment without knowing what you are commenting on. I have not said a single word about the story of the boy with the purported NDE. Not a word.

I dont care.

InSenze1:
Easy escapist route, simply congratulate others for their "patience" etc in order to disguise your own incapacity to articulate a meaningful point on the subject under discussion.

LordReed, I have tried to provide my further thoughts, but keep getting banned.
Will try again tomorrow.

- DeepSight
(Banned by spambot again)

Ok, waiting.

LordReed:
Ok, waiting.

Are you on WhatsApp?

DeepSight:
So you see here is the problem: what then was the purpose of taking me through this rigmarole if you knew this lay at the bottom of your proposition. Because this takes us right back to the implications I pointed out,viz: that you must necessarily imbue cells and neurons with intentionality and that you must also dispense with all precepts of personal responsibility.

You have taken us in a circle, and I am afraid you have been rather unhelpful, and I cannot but wonder why.
Perhaps you are uncertain of what you propose, or you have not properly settled down to consider it carefully and thoroughly.

I'm not a materialist but, you make a strawman of even the materialists views.

All biological life are made up of atoms, depending on the structure of said atoms (number of protons, neutrons and electrons) give them specific properties which we call elements, these elements when combined display properties that are entirely different from it's individual components (eg the gases H + O² and you have water). These elements when combined also have emergent properties that are not predictable from their individual components. Specific chemicals in different states or when combined, display self-assembly such as water forming snowflakes (a crystalline structure of the same chemical) or lipids forming from fatty acids and glycerol... A few more steps in this complex set of interactions, make up a biological organism, and a human mind.
So to a materialist, a person is not just atoms, chemicals or cells, but also a complex interactions of a set of natural phenomena. A mind and consciousness is just an emergent property of these natural phenomena interacting in ways yet to be completely understood.

A materialist view doesn't rob a person of individuality and responsibility. So you are making a huge leap from materialism to the non existence of personal responsibility.

On the subject of intentionality, that's a subject that would detract to talking about Natural selection and evolution.

Edit: Oh, sorry I jumped the gun and replied without reading the rest of your conversation with L..reed.

IMAliyu:
I'm not a materialist but, you make a strawman of even the materialists views.

All biological life are made up of atoms, depending on the structure of said atoms (number of protons, neutrons and electrons) give them specific properties which we call elements, these elements when combined display properties that are entirely different from it's individual components (eg the gases H + O² and you have water). These elements when combined also have emergent properties that are not predictable from their individual components. Specific chemicals in different states or when combined, display self-assembly such as water forming snowflakes (a crystalline structure of the same chemical) or lipids forming from fatty acids and glycerol... A few more steps in this complex set of interactions, make up a biological organism, and a human mind.
So to a materialist, a person is not just atoms, chemicals or cells, but also a complex interactions of a set of natural phenomena. A mind and consciousness is just an emergent property of these natural phenomena interacting in ways yet to be completely understood.

A materialist view doesn't rob a person of individuality and responsibility. So you are making a huge leap from materialism to the non existence of personal responsibility.

On the subject of intentionality, that's a subject that would detract to talking about Natural selection and evolution.

Edit: Oh, sorry I jumped the gun and replied without reading the rest of your conversation with L..reed.

Many thanks for your reasoned contribution, indeed I have quite a bit more to say in terms of elucidation, but the spambot has kept me off this thread for quite a while now. I shall try to re-post and hope it doesnt hit me again.

LordReed:
Ok, waiting.

Fingers Crossed, here goes . . .

DeepSight:
Fingers Crossed, here goes . . .

What you have presented to me as your position essentially is that the intangibles (or immaterial aspects) of man's being, arise entirely from the material aspects: in effect that mind arises from matter, from its combinations and interactions: that the chemical combinations and interactions may produce minds, concepts and ideas. My position is simple: that mind cannot arise from matter, and that matter is but a tool for the activity of mind in the physical.

Arsing from your position, I mentioned two implications which you have denied: I said that to sustain your position, you necessarily imbue cells and neurons with intentionality and secondly, I said that you thereby strip personal responsibility for anything from anyone and everyone. You wondered how I arrived at these conclusions and I tried to explain, but it doesn't seem that my explanations have come across. Here, I attempt again with greater attention to detail: but I shall start in reverse order with the second implication - namely the question of personal responsibility.

InSenze1:
What you have presented to me as your position essentially is that the intangibles (or immaterial aspects) of man's being, arise entirely from the material aspects: in effect that mind arises from matter, from its combinations and interactions: that the chemical combinations and interactions may produce minds, concepts and ideas. My position is simple: that mind cannot arise from matter, and that matter is but a tool for the activity of mind in the physical.

So then your conjecture arises not because of my position but because of yours. You think mind cannot arise from matter and that to think so would lead to the aforementioned conjecture. However my position is borne out by the facts, so far only physical living brains have been able to be demonstrated as having minds. Undeveloped brains (eg. human foetus, animals with rudimentary nervous systems) do not exhibit mind. If mind was not an emergent property of physical living bodies then we would see the opposite, all manner of bodies and non living things would demonstrate mind but we do not. Mind is an emergent property of living brains and bodies, it is a whole that is greater than the sum of its part, just like the wetness of water is more than just a property of the individual molecules of water. Mind arises because many physical living systems combine and their interaction conglomerates in ways that beat our intuition. We can see it as a child develops, we can see it in a person with brain damage, we see it in people with mental illness. The evidence is firm, mind arises from material. I invite you to present evidence that mind arises independently of the material or demonstrate that it is not inextricably tied to the body that gives rise to it.

InSenze1:
Arsing from your position, I mentioned two implications which you have denied: I said that to sustain your position, you necessarily imbue cells and neurons with intentionality and secondly, I said that you thereby strip personal responsibility for anything from anyone and everyone. You wondered how I arrived at these conclusions and I tried to explain, but it doesn't seem that my explanations have come across. Here, I attempt again with greater attention to detail: but I shall start in reverse order with the second implication - namely the question of personal responsibility.

While we wait for your response, take this into consideration. The mind is the aspect of the human imbued with Intentionality not the cells. You cannot will your cells to do anything, you can only will your body which is another evidence that mind and body are inextricable and function as a unit not as 2 disparate parts joined together.

Dear LordReed, I have really been taken through the most vile and sinister concentration camp by the spambot. Sadly, it appears there is just no way in which I will be permitted to post my response here. Therefore I am resorting to attaching it as a word document to this post (see link below my signature). Kindly take a look through. Perhaps you can quote it in full here just to make it available on the thread (you may not be banned as I was) or you can quote it in parts as you respond and then we can carry on from there. Whatever you do, please take the time to read it through and lets know your thoughts.

cc: IMAliyu
KnownUnknown (as I touch a little on evolution here which we may have cause to discuss arising from our last interaction)

Irupetepete:
All these are lies..
I was dead for over an hour this year, I saw nothing..
I repeat, you see nothing.
When I woke up, I could have fabricated convincing lies, atleast more than 70 people saw me lying dead..
If I told them I saw things, they will believe and help spread the lies..
So if anybody tells you he died, woke up and saw things, slap sense into their empty heads

It's not necessarily a "lie". Your mind is powerful and can play tricks on you especially in those moments of death when the brain is being deprived of oxygen.

DeepSight:
Dear LordReed, I have really been taken through the most vile and sinister concentration camp by the spambot. Sadly, it appears there is just no way in which I will be permitted to post my response here. Therefore I am resorting to attaching it as a word document to this post (see link below my signature). Kindly take a look through. Perhaps you can quote it in full here just to make it available on the thread (you may not be banned as I was) or you can quote it in parts as you respond and then we can carry on from there. Whatever you do, please take the time to read it through and lets know your thoughts.

cc: IMAliyu
KnownUnknown (as I touch a little on evolution here which we may have cause to discuss arising from our last interaction)

I will respond to you discussion points one by one so allow me to finish them all before you respond. I will also quote the dp I am responding to.

LordReed:
I will respond to you discussion points one by one so allow me to finish them all before you respond. I will also quote the dp I am responding to.

You have been banned!

@DeepSight, below is my response to your 1st point of discussion: Discussion Point One (DP1): "The Person"

The impression I get is that you are intent on treating my submissions as though I am a strict materialist, this is a strawman you are responding to in effect and means you are missing my points and arguing something else.

Recall that I said man is both the mental and physical aspects of his being so how then do you say things like "identity of a human person is not to be found in his body" as though I said man is only his body?

As for the seat of consciousness, there is no such thing since mind is an emergent property. It is like someone trying to isolate the wetness of water, that is an incoherent task that can never be achieved. Wetness is an emergent property of water that arises due to its physical nature. Mind is similar, there is no particular thing called mind so there is no seat for it. Mind arises by physical things functioning yet itself is not physical.

Identity is another non-physical aspect. It is a mental construct we use as placeholders for things. Take the ship of Theseus, it is changed part by part yet it is still the ship of Theseus because the identity is separate from the physical aspects of the ship and that identity is held in a non-physical "realm" so that even when all the parts have changed it is still the ship of Theseus. Let's relate that to a human being. If all your limbs and organs (except your brain cos that will be problematic) get replaced successively such that you eventually have a new body your identity will remain somewhat intact because you will still refer to yourself as you. I say somewhat because you will most likely acknowledge the change and use qualifiers like "new" or "improved" so new you or improved you. This is because your identity is non-physical and that part has not been touched. This is can be seen in trans people. They may change their bodies but their identity construct remain intact. In fact most of them make the changes because their identity construct and their biological bodies are in conflict and they resolve it by making the change.

@DeepSight response to DP2: Evolutionary imperatives

I am not sure why you think evolution has no explanation of the origin of consciousness. There are many scientific papers detailing the answer to that but the summary of it is what I have been harping on already, it is an emergent property which means there was a build up to this current state of consciousness we see in humans.

We can see this build up in other animals that do not yet have our level of consciousness. Take the dolphin, apes and dogs for example. Apes and dolphins express more of what we think of as consciousness than dogs do. An ape can recognise itself in a mirror but a dog can't, this is because their brains have obviously developed in different ways so that while they are both mammals and capable of even understanding human language to a certain extent, their levels of consciousness is quite different.

I have before invited you to present evidence that mind is separate from the physical body, you are yet to present any.

@DeepSight response to DP3: The Chicken & Egg Problem

This point is kinda funny, it is similar to claiming that a house has to be built instantaneously whole or else you can't build a house. One only has to look at how a house is built to see that the work in progress is way different from the finished outcome. You are basically saying to me that the foundations and skeletal framework that will support the finished outcome cannot come before the building is finished.

The things that provide the basis for our more advanced intellectual concepts by necessity started as very primitive concepts. Our written history is a literal documentation of our progress from the primitive to the sophisticated. Saying that evolution would limit us to primitive concepts seems to me to suggest that you completely miss the point even as you are looking at it. Evolution moved us from primitive form to our present day form and you seem to think we should have stuck with the primitive concepts we started with. Are you not seeing that you are contradicting yourself or else you'd also be asking why didn't we stay with our primitive forms. Just as our bodies evolved our thoughts and concepts also evolved.

Thank you LordReed for your responses thus far. I always appreciate it when a co-discussant takes time to go through a thought development process with a fine comb. Especially as I had feared that in this case the spambot may have dissuaded you. As per your earlier request I will await all your responses.

Bless.

@DeepSight response to DP4: Determinism

Now this is a proper argument from ignorance, we don't know how life stated therefore mind is not connected to matter. This is totally fallacious, mind has been almost conclusively shown to be inextricably tied to matter even if we don't know how life started.

Also not knowing how life started from dead matter doesn't mean we we can't see how life continues to propagate from dead matter. You don't eat living matter for instance, you eat dead matter and it aids in your survival and ability to replicate so to claim that our ignorance of the beginning of life precludes us from noting that life is natural process is very much fallacious.

That mind as an emergent property of matter clearly shows how dead matter can have properties that the individual matter particles do not. I previously made example from the property of water we call wetness which is not a property of the individual molecules of water but of the interactions of the molecules of water themselves, giving rise to a property that the individuals don't have. Same with life and mind, there are many interactions that take place to give rise to life and mind so there isn't any place to isolate life or mind. To be clear it is not every interaction in the body that gives rise to life and mind and we do not know at exactly what threshold those interactions combine to activate those functions but we have a pretty good idea. For instance we know that if there is loss of blood to the brain for certain periods you'll either get a damaged brain/damaged person or death. All of these thoroughly indicate that there is no separating of life and mind from the physical.

@DeepSight response to Implication: Intentionality imbued on Cells, Neurons.

Once again no intentionality is imbued to the cells and neurons or other chemicals because they are part of a whole. They aren't doing anything by themselves, instead whatever functions they perform gives rise to the ability of the individual to express intentionality. If we excise any part of the individual, it looses its place in the being expressing intentionality and by itself cannot perform any intentional action. Eg if a person's hand is cut off from their body it will not be able to do anything by itself.

Once again the evidence is abundant that all these things are natural processes and we are yet to see any evidence that it isn't.

DeepSight:
Thank you LordReed for your responses thus far. I always appreciate it when a co-discussant takes time to go through a thought development process with a fine comb. Especially as I had feared that in this case the spambot may have dissuaded you. As per your earlier request I will await all your responses.

Bless.

Thank you for your patience. I wanted to make sure I could post without getting shut down by the spambot. I am happy to respond to these questions as it gives me the chance to rollout and articulate my thoughts a little more firmly.

Please feel free to respond now, if you wish I will wait till you finish.

LordReed,

I should start by saying that I am well aware that I hold the short end of the stick in this discussion: because everything your position relies on can be discussed with reference to physical phenomena and science, whereas much of what my position relies on rests in the realm of the intangible and experiential. Nonetheless I am convinced of what I am trying to put across and because I have trust in both your rationality and fair-minded approach to issues, I am up for trying.

LordReed:
@DeepSight, below is my response to your 1st point of discussion: Discussion Point One (DP1): "The Person"

The impression I get is that you are intent on treating my submissions as though I am a strict materialist, this is a strawman you are responding to in effect and means you are missing my points and arguing something else.

Recall that I said man is both the mental and physical aspects of his being so how then do you say things like "identity of a human person is not to be found in his body" as though I said man is only his body?

I am afraid I do not agree that a strawman has been made for the simple reason that I doubt there is any strict materialist who would insist that such things as thoughts, emotions and the sense of self are physical in themselves (or if there are they must be very few and very fringe): rather the position of such materialists is simply that all such things arise from the activity/ interactions of material things - and this is exactly your position as well. This is to be contrasted with my position, for I do not believe that all of these things can be accounted for by the activity and interactions of matter alone, whereas you obviously do. In short, while you say that these intangibles arise from matter, I say that they do not - not entirely at any rate, for while matter plays a role as a tool or vehicle for the expression, experience of and manifestation of these intangibles, matter is a tool only, a vehicle only, for something which both reason and experience should lead us to be sure is not material.

As for the seat of consciousness, there is no such thing since mind is an emergent property. It is like someone trying to isolate the wetness of water, that is an incoherent task that can never be achieved. Wetness is an emergent property of water that arises due to its physical nature. Mind is similar, there is no particular thing called mind so there is no seat for it. Mind arises by physical things functioning yet itself is not physical.

This is where we disagree and the bold specifically sums that disagreement up.

Identity is another non-physical aspect. It is a mental construct we use as placeholders for things. Take the ship of Theseus, it is changed part by part yet it is still the ship of Theseus because the identity is separate from the physical aspects of the ship and that identity is held in a non-physical "realm" so that even when all the parts have changed it is still the ship of Theseus. Let's relate that to a human being. If all your limbs and organs (except your brain cos that will be problematic) get replaced successively such that you eventually have a new body your identity will remain somewhat intact because you will still refer to yourself as you. I say somewhat because you will most likely acknowledge the change and use qualifiers like "new" or "improved" so new you or improved you. This is because your identity is non-physical and that part has not been touched. This is can be seen in trans people. They may change their bodies but their identity construct remain intact. In fact most of them make the changes because their identity construct and their biological bodies are in conflict and they resolve it by making the change.

It is true that the body and mind are so intricately interlinked that the perception of the body perforce plays a part in the perception of identity, nevertheless it is my position that core identity ( "the being" ) is in itself something inward and by no means to be derived from, of or by the body.

I am aware that I have in this post merely stated my position as distinct from yours, and not offered up any deductive reasoning in that regard. I shall however attempt to do so as we go along. Nonetheless perhaps it is an apt time for me to warn that since the short end of the stick which I hold is mostly intangible and experiential as I said above, I shall be forced, at some point, to dwell a little on the subjective and experiential, which, while offering nothing in terms of scientific or objective argumentative value, I expect should to some extent still resonate with you as a fellow "experiencer."

LordReed:
@DeepSight response to DP2: Evolutionary imperatives

I am not sure why you think evolution has no explanation of the origin of consciousness. There are many scientific papers detailing the answer to that. . .

This is news to me. Perhaps you can assist me with pointing out such scientific papers which hopefully resolve the problem of consciousness conclusively.

. . . but the summary of it is what I have been harping on already, it is an emergent property which means there was a build up to this current state of consciousness we see in humans.

That there is a build-up to our current form and physical capacities is beyond cavil for me. Perhaps this is a good juncture at which to emphasize once again that I believe in evolution. I only do not believe that it is sufficient to account for the totality of life, especially conscious life and most especially self-conscious life which we observe today.

In truth evolution is for me completely deficient in accounting for many things which are still even physical, much less that which is intangible. Being an old boy on this forum you may well recall a thread I opened years ago about the evolution of the sexes and sexual reproduction. For me, that is one significant problem which the theory of evolution does not resolve.

Just to refresh your memory I laid out 12 posers regarding that question here -
https://www.nairaland.com/1571602/evolution-sexes-sexxual-reproduction#20521482

But I digress. Because the argument I was making with reference to a lack of evolutionary imperatives is simply that while there is an evolutionary imperative to develop for example capacities to hunt and eat, we cannot discern or articulate any evolutionary imperative for the higher faculties of mankind such as those which include a ceaseless philosophical curiosity and higher notions of morality and justice. I pointed out to you (and you seemed to completely ignore) the point that evolution by itself would promote the survival of the fittest, it would lead to the triumph of the moral standpoint that might is right in all things and that being consistent and true with evolutionary imperatives and evolutionary thinking alone, we must wind up justifying eugenics as not just a morally valid science but in fact probably necessary for the continued upward development and improvement of humanity.

You did not seem to tangibly address any of this in your response.

My position is that there is an altogether different faculty within man which is not suitably accounted for by recourse to the theory of evolution alone - and which is responsible for these higher impulses and cognitions of man - because such impulses and cognitions are not to be found in physical nature wheresoever - physical nature being probably the most competitively brutish thing that one could possibly conceive - as is evident throughout the wild.

Another factor I would like to draw your attention to is the great gulf that exists between man and every other creature to be found on the Earth with respect to these higher faculties. Because while there are indeed as you have pointed out, several intelligent species on Earth such as dogs, dolphins and apes, there is not one that we can properly say rests somewhere midway between the rest of the animal kingdom and the higher capacities of man. Not only is this something to ponder on in terms of the notorious gaps in the fossil record (which purportedly supports the theory of evolution with physical evidence), but this is something to also dwell on in terms of meaningfulness in the first place; viz: what causes man to be concerned with such higher thoughts as the meaning of life, the origin of the universe, eternity, infinity, the nature of time and the like - not to speak of the imponderable wonders of the arts and the senses of beauty and wonder.

It is altogether insufficient for anyone to simply propose that with sufficient time and gradual development these faculties would simply evolve. What pushes such evolution? Because the theory of evolution as articulated is premised on given suppositions such as the principle of survival of the fittest and random mutations none of which are sufficient to logically support the evolution of these higher faculties. The precision required for the development of organs such as the human brain and human eye alone require virtually impossible mathematical odds to evolve, so much so that such has often been likened to the probability that an ape playing with a computer keyboard could produce the complete works of Shakespeare if given sufficient billions or trillions of years. You must bear in mind that the human brain still far exceeds the most advanced computers in terms of complexity, and no one would ever be impudent enough to suggest that anything resembling such computers could occur naturally in the universe and without intelligent input - just given sufficient time. And yet such computers do not even have the faculty of self-consciousness, which is something else altogether!

And that brings me to the point that matter simply represents the hardware, while there exists an intangible aspect to our being - not derived from matter or its interactions and activity - which represents the software that we are - the information, which is simply run by and through matter, for the purpose of expression and manifestation.

I have before invited you to present evidence that mind is separate from the physical body, you are yet to present any.

As we go along. However as I said, I will have to touch on the experiential in doing so.

LordReed:
@DeepSight response to DP3: The Chicken & Egg Problem

This point is kinda funny, it is similar to claiming that a house has to be built instantaneously whole or else you can't build a house. One only has to look at how a house is built to see that the work in progress is way different from the finished outcome. You are basically saying to me that the foundations and skeletal framework that will support the finished outcome cannot come before the building is finished.

The things that provide the basis for our more advanced intellectual concepts by necessity started as very primitive concepts. Our written history is a literal documentation of our progress from the primitive to the sophisticated. Saying that evolution would limit us to primitive concepts seems to me to suggest that you completely miss the point even as you are looking at it. Evolution moved us from primitive form to our present day form and you seem to think we should have stuck with the primitive concepts we started with. Are you not seeing that you are contradicting yourself or else you'd also be asking why didn't we stay with our primitive forms. Just as our bodies evolved our thoughts and concepts also evolved.

I knew this particular point I was trying to make would be specially difficult to convey. It is either I failed to convey it properly or you failed to grasp it properly or some combination of both. Let me dwell a bit on the most succinct way to reformulate the point. Therefore let us park this Discussion Point for now. I will be back on this.