Equivalency Of Neuronal Loss And Mental Loss

[Scott Hernandez]

http://www.academia.edu/2795738/No_Mental_Life_after_Brain_Death_The_Argument_from_the_Neural_Localization_of_Mental_Functions

Been reading this. If every mental percept can be lost by damage to its neural correlate. I mean you can witness it in life. Damage your visual cortex in life and you lose any awareness of vision. Damage your hippocampus and you no longer can form new memories. Damage your auditory cortex and you lose any awareness of sound, etc. Then what's left to exist of you once the entire neural network is damaged/destroyed by death? I just don't get how this can be reconciled with Bernardo's worldview.

I'm not a typical nihilistic atheist. I want Bernardo to be right. I'm just wondering if there's holes in Bernardo's viewpoint/worldview in areas.

By the way, here's an interesting article which potentially offers hope of post-death existentiality:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/Can_The_Multiverse_Give_You_An_Afterlife

My optimistic view that's pretty scientifically consistent is that it's possible we might live in a universe in which after long timescales portions or the whole thing may repeat themselves (e.g. Poincaré recurrence time / quantum fluctuations). So therefore, if you accept the possibility of an infinitely long-lived universe allowing Poincaré recurrence, it's plausible we might find ourselves existing over and over again in the future and thereby experience a kind of naturalistic immortality.

[benjayk]

The assumption is that that question can be resolved through reliance on physical evidence alone.

Sure, there is a deep relation between brain state and mental state (although one shouldn't forget there are many cases where the nature of the relation isn't clear at all, like terminal lucidity or savant abilities after brain damage).
If you destroy certain regions you absolutely won't be able to physically see, hear etc...

The real question is whether that's because experience relies directly on an individual's brain, or due to an temporary entanglement of the mind and the brain - which limits the mind of a brain-damaged being as long as the entanglement remains.
I don't think it's that far-fetched to suggest that if that entanglement can be broken in any way, it's through death.

People with severe brain dysfunction can have extraordinarily vivd experiences during a NDE, just not of this world. Blind people even report being able to see.
None of this can be proven through physical evidence. We only have our own experience and reports of others.
That's simply the nature of experience. You can't directly measure it.

[Dana Lomas]

"Then what's left to exist of you once the entire neural network is damaged/destroyed by death?"

This is the crux of BK's metaphysics (and perhaps the most fundamental ontological question of all, 'What is experiencing existence?) ... What is left is 'that which experiences.' No-one is saying that the brain is not involved in perception, just that it's not TWE -- anymore than this computer is experiencing this communication. BK's ontology is all about demonstrating this to be the case, and dispelling the materialist notion to the contrary.

[Bernardo]

Two things to keep in mind:

1- A person's inability to recall or report an experience to others or even to self subsequent to brain damage is one thing; the absence of experience is another thing entirely. The problem is that one often cannot differentiate between the two (e.g. when you wake up in the morning you don't know whether you don't recall your dreams, or whether you simply didn't dream).  So I would say many types of brain damage that we construe to lead to a lack of experience lead simply to an inability to metacognize or recall experience. I wrote about this crucial albeit often-ignored difference in a paper coming out in the August issue of Europe's Journal of Psychology. I am attaching the pre-print here (please do not forward further or upload anywhere else until publication in August). I also wrote about idealism's interpretation of brain damage recently on Scientific American: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/transcending-the-brain/. These two papers contain everything that is needed to reconcile idealism with what you describe.

2- Consciousness does not require any trace of personality or memory to continue to exist as such. Consciousness is the subjective field of experience. Memories and personality are simply particular contents of consciousness, or excitations of the field. Even if many contents of consciousness dissolve -- i.e. the corresponding excitations subside -- upon death, consciousness may remain intact.

Cheers, B.

[Bernardo]

PS: Since the experiences of sense perception are obviously mediated by the body, death of the body should correlate with impairment of sense perception. This is the thrust of the examples you mention. But experience is much broader than sense perception: thoughts, emotions, intuition, imagination, hallucination, visions, etc., none of which is mediated by sense organs. The hypothesis here is that e.g. some form of thought, emotion and visions continue after bodily death, even if decoupled from a personality or a sense of individual identity, and even if not metacognitively accessible. There is evidence in this direction, as I discuss in the Scientific American paper.

On Wednesday, June 28, 2017 at 8:02:35 AM UTC+2, Bernardo wrote:

Two things to keep in mind:

1- A person's inability to recall or report an experience to others or even to self subsequent to brain damage is one thing; the absence of experience is another thing entirely. The problem is that one often cannot differentiate between the two (e.g. when you wake up in the morning you don't know whether you don't recall your dreams, or whether you simply didn't dream).  So I would say many types of brain damage that we construe to lead to a lack of experience lead simply to an inability to metacognize or recall experience. I wrote about this crucial albeit often-ignored difference in a paper coming out in the August issue of Europe's Journal of Psychology. I am attaching the pre-print here (please do not forward further or upload anywhere else until publication in August). I also wrote about idealism's interpretation of brain damage recently on Scientific American: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/transcending-the-brain/. These two papers contain everything that is needed to reconcile idealism with what you describe.

2- Consciousness does not require any trace of personality or memory to continue to exist as such. Consciousness is the subjective field of experience. Memories and personality are simply particular contents of consciousness, or excitations of the field. Even if many contents of conscious dissolve -- i.e. the corresponding excitations subside -- upon death, consciousness may remain intact.

[RHC]

Scott

Buy a copy of "Irreducible Mind". 

> If every mental percept can be lost by damage to its neural correlate. I mean you can witness it in life. Damage your visual cortex in life and you lose any awareness of vision. Damage your hippocampus and you no longer can form new memories. Damage your auditory cortex and you lose any awareness of sound, etc. Then what's left to exist of you once the entire neural network is damaged/destroyed by death? I just don't get how this can be reconciled with Bernardo's worldview.

One way to think about this is by analogy.  If you are in the middle of being in a very vivid dream and someone comes in and wakes you up, the dream ends but you are still there. 

Bernardo addresses this specific materialist argument in a number of places.  Look through his blog and/or you tube videos.  If you havent, try reading "Brief Peeks Beyond."

On Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 3:53:52 PM UTC-4, Scott Hernandez wrote: