Actually, the brain is not like a machine that performs the same way each time the same input is used. Every input actually changes the way that the brain functions. If the same input is used over and over again, the brain changes a little each time. If I watch a movie that I haven't seen before, my brain will react differently than if I watch it again right after.
A change in mood or knowledge is not a change in the way the brain functions. Learning is a change in memory and decision making processes, but it is not a change in the way a brain functions.
Brains are living organs and age. They also require nutrition. These things effect how a brain functions, not experience. Experience changes what a brain functions with, not how it functions.
The way a brain functions is determined by genetics, not the external world.
Once you have something like a brain you have something new in the universe. Something that decides for itself how it will act.
The brain does what it does according to genetic "programming". That is not behaving "freely".
The brain creates green under certain circumstances. It will always create green under those circumstances. This is not freedom.
Brain + input = colour. The brain alone does not equal colour. I would probably have to see light at some point in my life to experience colour.
Not true at all. If we could excite the proper pathways in the optic nerve we could cause the brain to create color.
A person would not necessarily need to be born with eyes to experience color. As long as the proper nerves could be stimulated in the proper fashion. Or even if the proper parts of the brain were stimulated in the proper way.
And of course we can imagine color without any color stimulus. I can imagine a big red flaming sun with my eyes closed.
The key point is not that brains create color and therefore we have this entity "color" that exists yet has no material existence.
The key point is that color is something completely new that the universe couldn't have caused because it only exists in minds. A universe devoid of color can't cause color. There is no possible mechanism.
Do you think that if someone forced your eyes open and showed you a red apple that you wouldn't experience red? Sorry, but we don't have that much control yet.
This is after billions of years of evolution.
But evolving organisms don't necessarily evolve eyes or the ability to create colors. Those things arise by chance, not because the world is forcing evolution in any particular direction.
Random chance (mutation) starts it.
Oh god, you know what I meant. In a specific instance it causes it.
You're talking about a stimulus, not a cause. The cause is evolution and random mutation. This causes the stimulus to have an effect. The stimulus is not the ultimate cause of anything.
I hope I read this wrong. The environment is a huge part of evolution because it causes many of the mutations by way of radiation.
Mutations occur randomly and for many reasons. Many are errors in replication. The vast majority are either harmful or have no effect.
But saying radiation can cause mutations is not saying radiation is guiding evolution in any way. Nothing is guiding evolution. Evolving life interacts with changing environments, but the environment is not guiding the process. It is just one factor determining which things that arise randomly survive.
They are abstractions we use to make predictions. Nature is nowhere an equation and something making calculations desperately trying to solve the equation to make adjustments. Nature has no need of equations and does not operate using them.
The only truth inherent in the models is that they can make predictions. The way they do this has nothing to do with how the universe operates.
The environment's equations are the original equations that we transcribed into symbols.
There are no equations beyond animals that invent them. Things are moving the way they move because of inherent properties, not equations.
We abstract these inherent properties into numbers and mathematical functions so we can make predictions.
But there is a difference between our abstractions and the real thing. They are not close to being the same thing. Equations are not behavior based on inherent properties. To think they are is to not understand either.
