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Re: in search of the soul, aka amateur neuroscience
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pnyikos
May 22, 2012, 10:29:52 PM5/22/12
to nyi...@bellsouth.net
On May 21, 7:17 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dale wrote:
> > let's see, when we are awake
>
> > 1) we have senses, various forms of life have various senses, some might
> > be considered ESP
Pseudoscience. There may be senses unlike ours: the heat sense of pit
vipers, the sonar of bats and cetaceans, the lateral line of fish --
all these may be associated with sensations that we cannot even begin
to imagine. But they are all sensory, not extra-sensory.
> Not sure I'd extend consciousness to all animals.
Descartes refused to extend it to any non-human animal. In
letters to Mersenne, he wrote:
We are so accustomed to persuade ourselves that the brute
beasts
feel as we do [a habit of thought engendered by "the
resemblance
between most of the actions of the beasts and our own"] that
it
is difficult for us to rid ourselves of this opinion. But if
we
were as accustomed to seeing automata which imitate perfectly
all
those of our actions which they can imitate, and to taking
them
for automata only, we should have no doubt at all that the
irrational animals are automata too.
-- Letter of July 13, 1640
I do not explain the feeling of pain without recourse to the
soul...but I do so explain all the external motions which in
us
accompany that feeling: these alone are found in the beasts,
and
not pain properly speaking.
--Letter of June 11, 1640
Hume seemed just as sure of the opposite:
Animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even
reason, though in a more imperfect manner than men: are their
souls also immaterial and immortal?
--Of the Immortality of the Soul
> It is probably fairly
> limited in humans, but we suffer from the so-called streetlight effect,
> where we see what is visible to us (ie- what is presently in conscious
> awareness or present working memory).
Good thing too--I'd go crazy if I were aware of everything that goes
on in my body.
> > can a consciousness exist without the body? is there dualism or is there
> > just separative qualities that happen at some point?
>
> No. Consciousness is a result of neural processes.
You are a materialist; and like so many materialists, your seem to
have no doubt whatsoever that materialism is correct.
Arrayed against you are Homer, the unknown author of the Chandogya
Upanishad, at least one author of the book of Daniel, Plato, Jesus,
St. Paul, and Mohammed--- and Descartes. Even William James was open
to the possibility of an immortal soul.
Sure, you can marshal some people on your side, and not just Marx,
Engels, and Freud. But they don't impess me as much as some of the
people I've named, and I could name a lot more who were at least open
to the possibility of souls.
> > when you are dreaming where does your consciousness go?
>
> There may be a limit amount of self-awareness when dreaming. If lucid
> dreams occur,
And they do. I wrote about one example with on another thread,
"cognition," in response to Arkalen:
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/e2609e4679075c3c
No reply from her so far.
> you might have a limited level of consciousness.
Here is another example. I dreamed I was walking down a well-lit
corridor with cinder block walls, and suddenly I became aware that I
was dreaming. I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I banged my
hand against this wall." I promptly did so in my dream, and it felt
just like banging against a solid wall, minus any pain.
Did that shake my conviction that I was dreaming? Not at all. I
merely said to myself, "My, this IS a vivid dream!"
[...]
> This article gets into the differences between memories of episodes that
> happen to you and can be verbalized and memories that are more emotiona
> laden and take a different path through the brain:
>
> http://discovermagazine.com/2003/mar/cover
Into which category does the above dream episode fall?
> Edouard Claparede found that a patient who could not form new memories
> thus remember him could still act cautiously if she was pricked by a pin
> by him on a prior encounter.
There was an expert chess player named Claparede. Same person?
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/
nyikos @ math.sc.edu
> Dale wrote:
> > let's see, when we are awake
>
> > 1) we have senses, various forms of life have various senses, some might
> > be considered ESP
Pseudoscience. There may be senses unlike ours: the heat sense of pit
vipers, the sonar of bats and cetaceans, the lateral line of fish --
all these may be associated with sensations that we cannot even begin
to imagine. But they are all sensory, not extra-sensory.
> Not sure I'd extend consciousness to all animals.
Descartes refused to extend it to any non-human animal. In
letters to Mersenne, he wrote:
We are so accustomed to persuade ourselves that the brute
beasts
feel as we do [a habit of thought engendered by "the
resemblance
between most of the actions of the beasts and our own"] that
it
is difficult for us to rid ourselves of this opinion. But if
we
were as accustomed to seeing automata which imitate perfectly
all
those of our actions which they can imitate, and to taking
them
for automata only, we should have no doubt at all that the
irrational animals are automata too.
-- Letter of July 13, 1640
I do not explain the feeling of pain without recourse to the
soul...but I do so explain all the external motions which in
us
accompany that feeling: these alone are found in the beasts,
and
not pain properly speaking.
--Letter of June 11, 1640
Hume seemed just as sure of the opposite:
Animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even
reason, though in a more imperfect manner than men: are their
souls also immaterial and immortal?
--Of the Immortality of the Soul
> It is probably fairly
> limited in humans, but we suffer from the so-called streetlight effect,
> where we see what is visible to us (ie- what is presently in conscious
> awareness or present working memory).
Good thing too--I'd go crazy if I were aware of everything that goes
on in my body.
> > can a consciousness exist without the body? is there dualism or is there
> > just separative qualities that happen at some point?
>
> No. Consciousness is a result of neural processes.
You are a materialist; and like so many materialists, your seem to
have no doubt whatsoever that materialism is correct.
Arrayed against you are Homer, the unknown author of the Chandogya
Upanishad, at least one author of the book of Daniel, Plato, Jesus,
St. Paul, and Mohammed--- and Descartes. Even William James was open
to the possibility of an immortal soul.
Sure, you can marshal some people on your side, and not just Marx,
Engels, and Freud. But they don't impess me as much as some of the
people I've named, and I could name a lot more who were at least open
to the possibility of souls.
> > when you are dreaming where does your consciousness go?
>
> There may be a limit amount of self-awareness when dreaming. If lucid
> dreams occur,
And they do. I wrote about one example with on another thread,
"cognition," in response to Arkalen:
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/e2609e4679075c3c
No reply from her so far.
> you might have a limited level of consciousness.
Here is another example. I dreamed I was walking down a well-lit
corridor with cinder block walls, and suddenly I became aware that I
was dreaming. I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I banged my
hand against this wall." I promptly did so in my dream, and it felt
just like banging against a solid wall, minus any pain.
Did that shake my conviction that I was dreaming? Not at all. I
merely said to myself, "My, this IS a vivid dream!"
[...]
> This article gets into the differences between memories of episodes that
> happen to you and can be verbalized and memories that are more emotiona
> laden and take a different path through the brain:
>
> http://discovermagazine.com/2003/mar/cover
Into which category does the above dream episode fall?
> Edouard Claparede found that a patient who could not form new memories
> thus remember him could still act cautiously if she was pricked by a pin
> by him on a prior encounter.
There was an expert chess player named Claparede. Same person?
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/
nyikos @ math.sc.edu
Arkalen
May 25, 2012, 2:57:22 PM5/25/12
to
statements about dreams, not universal ones, so while your
counter-examples were interesting they didn't affect anything I was
saying. Dreams are very different from one another, and very different
from one person to another (or even one person at different times in
their lives), of course some will make more sense than others.
And that's not even considering the effects of memory. We start
forgetting dreams the second we wake up (again, a general statement not
a universal one), and given how our memories of real events can change
over time this is probably ten times as true for memories of dreams.
I'll note by the way that lucid dreams don't necessarily make much more
sense than non-lucid ones. I had a lucid dream where my brother and I
were driving away from some kind of danger, and I realized I was
dreaming when I went "wait, how can he be driving ? He doesn't have his
permit !".
You know, forget that he was 14 and didn't know how to drive. When I
thought back on it after I'd woken up I could clearly see that while I'd
been lucid dreaming, as in aware of and controlling the dream, my
dream-self was still distinctly "off" compared to my waking self.
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