• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Do minds exist?

untermensche said:
If you say the object is blue then you are saying the light is also blue. You are saying that a certain wavelength of light carries blue information from objects.
Click to expand...
No, I'm saying that light carries information about the surface of the object. You know when you watch tv and you see an image. Well the signal that gets sent to your tv isn't an image. It's just information about an image. I know that must come as quite a surprise, but it's true. You can send information about a thing without that information being that thing. Pretty wild, heh?!

untermensche said:
The mind is what experiences color. The brain creates it.
Click to expand...
What a nice story. The brain creates something it doesn't need to create and then that thing "hits" our minds and we experience colours. Fantastic. I love it. You have a wonderful imagination.

But tell me, these "colours" created by the brain how exactly do they hit our minds?

untermensche said:
Color is only an experience. It isn't an arbitrary wavelength of light or an arbitrary reflective surface or a property of objects.
Click to expand...
Are you really saying that the wavelength of reflected light and the properties of surfaces are arbitrary? This is news. Do you want to break the story to all the top physics journals or should I? Just to think of all that time they wasted labouring under the delusion that these things were not the products of chance or whimsy.

I promise that I won't take any credit for your discovery. You earned that all by yourself.

untermensche said:
What I saying is that energy exists.

Animals have evolved specialized cells that are able to be excited by certain wavelengths of energy.

But there is nothing that forces those evolving animals to make specific colors from that energy. The colors they make are random contingencies.
Click to expand...
Why on earth would they be random contingencies? Sure there might be variations because of biological differences between species and individuals, but that doesn't make it random.

untermensche said:
So one animal could theoretically evolve to turn a certain wavelength of energy into the color blue. But another animal could theoretically turn that same energy into the color red. There is nothing forcing the animal to produce a specific color in response to energy. The colors we produce are random contingencies, not properties of objects.
Click to expand...
So let's get this straight. Light of certain wavelength reflects off an object and hits photoreceptor cells in our eyes. But that doesn't tell us anything about the surface of the object, so our brains hallucinate colours so that we can experience the surface being different from other surfaces in our environment, even though there is nothing in the light that could possibly let us know that those surfaces are not the same.

I didn't think you would equal your story about minds experiencing colour, but you did it.

One last thing, since all colour perception is random, and nothing about the surface of an object or the light reflected from it have anything at all to do with what colour we end up experiencing, why do lemons seem to be a different colour than plums? I get that you are saying my yellow might look like your purple, but why shouldn't my purple and yellow look the same to me? I mean its all just random after all. It's kind of like how if I roll two dice, I can get the same result on both. So why aren't their more people with normally functioning retinal cones saying things like lemons are the same colour as plums?
 
untermensche said:
fromderinside said:
This should be enough.



R U sure?

As I understand, some rocks have evolved to the point where when pressed they emit a current (electrons jumping around from one molecule to another).

Clay is a form of rock that some abiogeneticists believe was the bonding template, where electrons jumped around for RNA where those electrons jump around in molecules you are so fond of excluding from other forms of evolution. There are others ......, but, this should be enough for you to go to the optometrist and get a more scientific pair of glasses.

As for fitness, where did you learn that entities are trying to survive? If they are fit they survive. If not. Bye. We're into population stuff here bud. Individuals don't try anything in fitness. You go into the equation and if you produce offspring where the relevant genes along with a bunch of others not really involved are preserved. You are gonna die no matter what.
Click to expand...

Rocks have not evolved new properties. They have the exact same properties today they had two billion years ago.

Life on the other hand evolves and is not the same thing today it was 2 billion years ago.

And one of those changes was the evolution of minds.
Click to expand...
Look at rocks more carefully.

Humans are made of cell aggregates which have pretty much fixed properties. Skin, muscle, nerve, etc.

Rocks are made of mineral combinations which are changing as erosion and recombination go on. The proportions of minerals are pretty much fixed by solar formation limitations, but their distributions have changed as time goes passes, the heavier first going to gravitational centers and the lightest going back into the cosmos. Evolution to different ends is all you are seeing.

As for two billion years ago rock combinations and aggregations have moved from two super continents to several back to one and back to several. Hey, there's even correlation between rock evolution and life evolution. Look at what happened to both about 550 million years ago.


This conversation is becoming a bit tired. You are stuck on the uniqueness of fitness when there are equivalents for every form of evolution I've mentioned. So far for every uniqueness you've pointed to for life evolution, I've found similar mechanisms for rock or geological evolution. Now comes the time when you need to reconsider your position, include physical law into everything and just sit back and see the beauty of evolving systems throughout the physical organic, inorganic, cosmic, quantum mechanic, world.

Most clearly the second law of thermodynamics drives everything to change toward disorganization. What we call evolution is that disorganizing process among the the classes we choose to study our organization in those classes due to it. Ultimately the organizational imperative of for living things will deplete essential resources well before physical conditions make life impossible and life will fall back into the general chemical, then energy, then field, malaise and disappear.
 
MJGraham said:
No, I'm saying that light carries information about the surface of the object. You know when you watch tv and you see an image. Well the signal that gets sent to your tv isn't an image. It's just information about an image. I know that must come as quite a surprise, but it's true. You can send information about a thing without that information being that thing. Pretty wild, heh?!

untermensche said:
The mind is what experiences color. The brain creates it.
Click to expand...
What a nice story. The brain creates something it doesn't need to create and then that thing "hits" our minds and we experience colours. Fantastic. I love it. You have a wonderful imagination.

But tell me, these "colours" created by the brain how exactly do they hit our minds?

untermensche said:
Color is only an experience. It isn't an arbitrary wavelength of light or an arbitrary reflective surface or a property of objects.
Click to expand...
Are you really saying that the wavelength of reflected light and the properties of surfaces are arbitrary? This is news. Do you want to break the story to all the top physics journals or should I? Just to think of all that time they wasted labouring under the delusion that these things were not the products of chance or whimsy.

I promise that I won't take any credit for your discovery. You earned that all by yourself.

untermensche said:
What I saying is that energy exists.

Animals have evolved specialized cells that are able to be excited by certain wavelengths of energy.

But there is nothing that forces those evolving animals to make specific colors from that energy. The colors they make are random contingencies.
Click to expand...
Why on earth would they be random contingencies? Sure there might be variations because of biological differences between species and individuals, but that doesn't make it random.

untermensche said:
So one animal could theoretically evolve to turn a certain wavelength of energy into the color blue. But another animal could theoretically turn that same energy into the color red. There is nothing forcing the animal to produce a specific color in response to energy. The colors we produce are random contingencies, not properties of objects.
Click to expand...
So let's get this straight. Light of certain wavelength reflects off an object and hits photoreceptor cells in our eyes. But that doesn't tell us anything about the surface of the object, so our brains hallucinate colours so that we can experience the surface being different from other surfaces in our environment, even though there is nothing in the light that could possibly let us know that those surfaces are not the same.

I didn't think you would equal your story about minds experiencing colour, but you did it.

One last thing, since all colour perception is random, and nothing about the surface of an object or the light reflected from it have anything at all to do with what colour we end up experiencing, why do lemons seem to be a different colour than plums? I get that you are saying my yellow might look like your purple, but why shouldn't my purple and yellow look the same to me? I mean its all just random after all. It's kind of like how if I roll two dice, I can get the same result on both. So why aren't their more people with normally functioning retinal cones saying things like lemons are the same colour as plums?
Click to expand...

Bloody shit man! I definitely was right about you! I mean untermensch is does say weird things but i never seen someone so eager to misrepresent his statements like this!!!

Light has a spectrum. The eyes detects some features and encodes the spectrum, not individual frequncies) into information. The brain then creates colors from this information. Colors are symbols.
 
MJGraham said:
No, I'm saying that light carries information about the surface of the object.
Click to expand...

There is no problem with this. As I said, energy exists and reflective surfaces exist.

But what we don't have and what you have not shown in any way, is a specific color assigned to that information.

An evolving brain can take that information and produce any color or perhaps even a sound from it. There is nothing forcing evolving brains to make specific colors from that information.

The colors they make are just random contingencies.

And colors exist only in minds. They are direct evidence of the existence of minds.

If somebody knows about colors they have a mind.

You know when you watch tv and you see an image.
Click to expand...

You already know about TV's so it is surprising you have trouble with this.

A television takes a signal (information) that comes into it via cable or even through the air and turns that information into the picture on the screen.

This is analogous to a brain taking a signal (information) from the optic nerve and turning that information into the experience of vision. Vision is a creation of the brain.

Experienced by the mind.
 
fromderinside said:
Look at rocks more carefully.

Humans are made of cell aggregates which have pretty much fixed properties. Skin, muscle, nerve, etc.
Click to expand...

So quickly you run aground.

These cells did not exist 2 billion years ago. And the things these cells can do did not exist 2 billion years ago.

But go play with your rocks.

It's easy. They haven't learned a new trick in 2 billion years.
 
MJGraham said:
untermensche said:
Color is only an experience. It isn't an arbitrary wavelength of light or an arbitrary reflective surface or a property of objects.
Click to expand...
Are you really saying that the wavelength of reflected light and the properties of surfaces are arbitrary?
Click to expand...

No, he's saying that color isn't a wavelength of light, it's a product of the mind. And he's right. If you've only ever studied physics rather than neuroscience you might well have run into the simplication that each colour is simply a wavelength of light. The truth is a little more complicated.

Color identification in humans runs on hue saturation and brightness. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/hue-saturation-and-brightness) Hue is your wavelength, saturation is your relation to the other colours in the enviroment, and brightness is the energy output from the source. The key point here is that the measures, even from the photoreceptors in the retina, are relative and not just absolute measures.

Moving onto the visual cortex, you then get identification of these patterns, and resolving them into a more complete picture of the world. The higher you go through this area, the more the system connects to memory and other areas of the brain.

So in simple terms, you can change the color someone perceives, without changing the light from the object, in a variety of ways. You can change the pattern of light in the enviroment, and that will change the perception of the object without any information from the object being changed. Or you can change the you can change the visual cues in the enviroment, causing the subject to understand what they are seeing in a different way, and that will change the colour perceived.

The point more generally is that the brain does form mental models of the outside world, and it does act on the basis of those mental models. If you feel you can sucessfully predict behaviour without reference to such models, then by all means do so. No one is stopping you. However, the sucessful models in this area use internal states, internal models, and much of the bag and baggage that make up 'mind'.

A fairly dramatic demonstration of this has been in studying the behaviour of rats in navigating a reasonably complicated (3 dimensional) maze. There are several ways in which this could be done in theory, from memorising the patterns of foot movments, or increasing favourability ratings of different parts of the complex based on past experience. But in practice the evidence from the neurology is that rats actually form a mental model.

You're welcome to try and argue for the idea that there is no such thing as 'mind', that internal models and internal representations are an unecessary distraction. Just bear in mind that such a view is not particularly useful, or sucessful, and that much of the evidence is against it.
 
Togo said:
No, he's saying that color isn't a wavelength of light, it's a product of the mind.
Click to expand...

Not exactly.

I don't think the mind produces the visual experience. The brain does that. The mind experiences vision. It doesn't produce it.

This gets complicated because the "will" can direct and focus vision, and memory can influence vision, so the mind is involved in some way and is not completely removed from the process.
 
untermensche said:
fromderinside said:
Look at rocks more carefully.

Humans are made of cell aggregates which have pretty much fixed properties. Skin, muscle, nerve, etc.
Click to expand...

So quickly you run aground.

These cells did not exist 2 billion years ago. And the things these cells can do did not exist 2 billion years ago.

But go play with your rocks.

It's easy. They haven't learned a new trick in 2 billion years.
Click to expand...

So you take something that, by nature, is progressive within its process, and use it to exclude something that is, by nature, combinatoric within its process and exclude it from things that prescribes process from discussions of descriptions of process patterns. That would be a bit like saying insects aren't normal evolvers wouldn't it?

If you have even the slightest doubt and show where rocks or planetary geo-evolution are excluded from being described as evolving outside your biocentric spectacled view. As an aid heck out

Evolution

noun

1.any process of formation or growth; development:the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.


2.a product of such development; something evolved :The exploration of space is the evolution of decades of research.


3.Biology. change in the gene pool of a populationfrom generation to generation by such processesas mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.

4.a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive changeor development, as in social or economic structureor institutions.

5.a motion incomplete in itself, but combining with coordinated motions to produce a single action, as in a machine.

6.a pattern formed by or as if by a series of movements: the evolutions of a figure skater.


7.
an evolving or giving off of gas, heat, etc.
Click to expand...

Do you see anything there that precludes evolution of rocks from being discussed as evolving in nature, having a existence or presence (one would be life of course) span, as part of the description of the overall planetary geological process?
 
fromderinside said:
untermensche said:
So quickly you run aground.

These cells did not exist 2 billion years ago. And the things these cells can do did not exist 2 billion years ago.

But go play with your rocks.

It's easy. They haven't learned a new trick in 2 billion years.
Click to expand...

So you take something that, by nature, is progressive within its process, and use it to exclude something that is, by nature, combinatoric within its process and exclude it from things that prescribes process from discussions of descriptions of process patterns. That would be a bit like saying insects aren't normal evolvers wouldn't it?

If you have even the slightest doubt and show where rocks or planetary geo-evolution are excluded from being described as evolving outside your biocentric spectacled view. As an aid heck out

Evolution

noun

1.any process of formation or growth; development:the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.


2.a product of such development; something evolved :The exploration of space is the evolution of decades of research.


3.Biology. change in the gene pool of a populationfrom generation to generation by such processesas mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.

4.a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive changeor development, as in social or economic structureor institutions.

5.a motion incomplete in itself, but combining with coordinated motions to produce a single action, as in a machine.

6.a pattern formed by or as if by a series of movements: the evolutions of a figure skater.


7.
an evolving or giving off of gas, heat, etc.
Click to expand...

Do you see anything there that precludes evolution of rocks from being discussed as evolving in nature, having a existence or presence (one would be life of course) span, as part of the description of the overall planetary geological process?
Click to expand...

Evolution of other than life occurs. Language, for example. There are clear descendents of known languages. There is an evolution in, say, telephones and recorded media players.
However, rocks do not evolve over time in the same way, if at all. There is no sense of descendancy. No way in which the grandchildren of the original rock necessarily resemble that original.
Evolution by natural selection requires nearly perfect replication and a source of small changes which may or may not improve that individual's survival.

Rocks, as lava, do change over time, but it does not replicate even though it crystallizes. A beach of tiny rocks called sand "evolves" in a way, but again, has no descendants.

Life-as-we-know-it, DNA life, is complicated at every level. Among other things it manages to generate an organism that is not only aware of its surroundings but can self-program. The self-programmer is called the mind "belonging to" or "of" a body. Self-programming includes learning and planning. The mind is responsible for learning and planning.

A "mind" is that portion of the neurology that call itself "I" and refers to itself as "me," and considers this body "mine."
 
hmm... so body dissociative disorder isn't rooted in the chemistry of the brain..?
you know where people don't identify parts or the whole of their body theirs?
just a side issue but it is there.
 
Juma said:
none said:
your retarded post
Click to expand...

It is in no way retarded. It succintly answered the post it was a reply to.
Do you think it is wrong then please state what is wrong with it.

"Retarded" isnt really that clear...
Click to expand...
retarded is the best I can come up with to describe it.
if I asked you to explain it you'd just say it needs no explanation, and you would be right because it is retarded.
i'll wait for you back on topic
 
fromderinside said:
untermensche said:
So quickly you run aground.

These cells did not exist 2 billion years ago. And the things these cells can do did not exist 2 billion years ago.

But go play with your rocks.

It's easy. They haven't learned a new trick in 2 billion years.
Click to expand...

So you take something that, by nature, is progressive within its process, and use it to exclude something that is, by nature, combinatoric within its process and exclude it from things that prescribes process from discussions of descriptions of process patterns. That would be a bit like saying insects aren't normal evolvers wouldn't it?

If you have even the slightest doubt and show where rocks or planetary geo-evolution are excluded from being described as evolving outside your biocentric spectacled view. As an aid heck out
Click to expand...

This is pathetic.

As I already have said several times, humans are free to call any kind of change "evolution".

But biological evolution is not the same thing as rocks being pushed and squeezed and slowly worn away.

One only need be completely ignorant of biological evolution and the phenomena of life to think it is.

Or a pathetic poser.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom