You are baffled regardless of what anyone says....I have already said that my contention lies in the remark 'but not sufficient condition for the existence of a mind'' - so what does ''not sufficient'' mean?
As written, a 'not sufficient condition' implies something more. But what more than a brain is necessary to explain mind/consciousness?
I don't insist that this is what Emily meant, but as written, not sufficient condition, implies that something more than a brain may be needed to explain the existence mind.
What could that be?
If the brain is said to be a not sufficient condition to explain the existence of mind/consciousness, then what? What are the options?
Holy shit. This is high school algebra.
"Necessary" means that without a brain, it is not possible for a mind to exist.
"Not sufficient" means that brain is not the only element required for a mind to exist. It means that something else is also necessary.
Holy Shit...that was the point. I know that you meant that something else was needed. After all that is what ''not sufficient'' clearly means, and this was the very thing I was questioning.
This should not have been hard to understand
And since this seems so incredibly difficult for you to grasp, despite many repeated examples, I'll try this again: The brain needs to be alive and has to be sufficiently function and has to have the appropriate cerebral cortex or whatever-the-fuck part of the brain is responsible for consciousness and self-awareness and has to have the part of the brain that exhibits rational directed thought and has to have the capacity for reason in some form or other and has to have a functioning part that accepts sensory input and translated that input appropriately.
The difficulty in understanding lies in your inability to grasp that I was questioning the very thing you say and mean, as you say that '''something else is also necessary''
That ''something else is also necessary'' being the point of contention.
For fuck's sake, your argument is pretty much "a body is a person". Which is naively simplistic - the body has to be human and it has to be functioning, at a very minimum, and beyond that the body has to possess a brain capable of self-awareness or at least the capacity thereof under normal circumstances. Failure to meet those other requirements means that it is NOT SUFFICIENT. If a body were necessary AND sufficient, then a fetus would be a person and abortion would be murder.
For fuck's sake? Drop the mock outrage. You have shown that you have a poor understanding of neuroscience, experiments, research, results, analysis, etc, and you wrongly accused me of not understanding your 'not sufficient' remark when in fact that is what I was questioning (plus your following remarks).
Plus, a fetus is developing into a person. To become a person in the sense of developing a conscious identity, language, name, family connections, skills, life experience requires a functional brain that gathers information, processes that information and creates a sense of identity.
Now information exists independently from the brain, the external world of objects and events, but without a brain to acquire and process this information, there is no person, there is no self identity, there is no consciousness or mind.
That is the point that either flies over your head, or you refuse to acknowledge the simple fact of it.
As it stands, your argument that a brain is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a mind implies that every creature on the planet can be said to possess a mind... which is a pretty aspirational claim. Additionally, it would imply that the brains in dead people are sufficient for a mind to exist, which means that somehow a magical mind lingers on after death.
There you go, displaying a complete disregard to everything I have said to date. Or else no understanding of what I have said.
Look back through this thread, I have always maintained that it is the state and condition of a brain that is expressed in its output in terms of behaviour and experience.
A sufficiently damaged human brain cannot generate a normal range behaviour, sight may fail, reasoning may be impaired and so on.
The brains of other species produce behaviour that is related to the architecture of their brains. No more, no less. An animal may have a conscious experience of its environment, vision, hearing, smell, etc, but no ability to reason, no ability to make plans for the future, etc, because the architecture of its brain does not allow it.
That is what you overlook.
