Concepts and Percepts--Are They Different? Are They Certain?

Nathan,

You sure are a charmer. Cows? Walking cheeseburgers? LOLOL...

btw - What do you see when you see female human beings then?

ahem...

But OK. As I just stated in an e-mail, I will try to keep my own lump of meat in line...

//;-)

Michael

Post 61

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 6:53pm

Nathan,
I could be all wet here, but I have heard it said that far from modeling the human mind on the computer,
we model computers on the human mind.

This might sound like a distinction without a difference, but I'm inclined to think there's something to it. The alternative usually leads to a, rightly mocked, materialistic reductionism. (I know the latter is pretty popular with Oists, but I think they get hung by their petards pretty easily by professional philosophers for this.)

Or I could just be full of it.

Jeff

P.S. By the way, I am inordinately fond of cheeseburgers and the cows down the highway at Wood's meat processing ranch look pretty much to me like they deserve it.

(Edited by Jeff Perren on 5/09, 6:57pm)

Post 62

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 8:13pm

Michael:

You sure are a charmer. Cows? Walking cheeseburgers? LOLOL...

It gets even worse: when I see cheeseburgers I see pectoral and bicep and quadriceps and biceps femoris muscles, given enough heavy iron moved around.

btw - What do you see when you see female human beings then?

Is that your way of asking if I'm gay?

Answer: Only in the obsolete sense, happy. Sorry, boys.

But OK. As I just stated in an e-mail, I will try to keep my own lump of meat in line...

I often hear that the line forms at the rear. LOL

Stop! This is getting out of hand, which is the safest place to keep it, I'm told.

Nathan

Post 63

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 8:24pm

Jeff:

I could be all wet here, but I have heard it said that far from modeling the human mind on the computer, we model computers on the human mind.

At really advanced levels there's some truth to that. Cogsci and compsci are cross-fertile fields.

At the level of ordinary home computers, though, there's not much resemblance.

This might sound like a distinction without a difference, but I'm inclined to think there's something to it. The alternative usually leads to a, rightly mocked, materialistic reductionism. (I know the latter is pretty popular with Oists, but I think they get hung by their petards pretty easily by professional philosophers for this.)

I think my plate is full now without wandering off into that. Maybe another time.

P.S. By the way, I am inordinately fond of cheeseburgers and the cows down the highway at Wood's meat processing ranch look pretty much to me like they deserve it.

They're heart-healthy. But only if you move about 5-25,000 pounds of weight a week. Otherwise that nasty C stuff goes up.

Maybe I should just lift the cows.

Nathan

Post 64

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 8:50pm

Nathan:

I find your view mostly reasonable, but this might be because it already largely coincides with mine. I'm somewhat familiar with information processing and the use of computers as models for the human mind. Perhaps where we differ is that you seem to be coming from a naive realist position (if you're familiar with that term, then you'll know it's not meant to be insulting), while I tend to approach science (which is what I think we're dealing with here) from a largely pragmatic/instrumentalist position. Although, perhaps you're instrumentalist too, just using naive realist exposition. <shrug> Too big a distraction to discuss here though. I will say that I think computer models, though very useful, do have their limits, as does representationalism. But I'll save that discussion for another thread.

Jeff:

Do you believe percepts are physical, like a neuron is?

I think I'm like Nathan in that I think all mental processes are ultimately physical. Actually, I think everything "supervenes" on the physical, and I think mental stuff like "percepts" are really just patterns in the physical. I suspect percepts are more diffuse than neurons are, but that's fairly irrelevant. I should mention that it might be useful to talk about percepts in nonphysical terms, but that's my instrumentalism creeping in.

Michael:

Ayn Rand wrote reams of stuff against the mind/body dichotomy. Of course she thinks percepts and concepts are physical "things" - she called them "mental units" and they are created, held and manipulated physically inside a living brain in this reality....I am sure that she would have agreed that percepts and concepts are organic in nature. They go away (die) when a brain dies....to her they were definitely things that existed in reality. Not floating abstractions cut off from a very physical living brain.

I suppose you're not aware the many folks who call themselves Objectivists disagree as to whether reality is necessarily only physical in nature. They point to consciousness, as Jeff did, and argue like Peikoff that consciousness is irreducible to any constituent elements. (See Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: Russian Radical, pg 141, quoting Peikoff from his lectures 1990-91T). Sciabarra put forth some persuasive evidence that Rand opposed Materialism and advocated a more organic realism instead.

From the horses mouth, Rand herself refused to commit to a strictly physical universe. She writes, "[W]e couldn't say: everything is material, if by 'material' we mean that of which the physical objects on the perceptual level are made--'material' in the normal perceptual meaning of the word. If this is what we mean by 'material,' then we do not have the knowledge to say that ultimately everything is sub-atomic particles which in certain aggregates are matter." ITOE, pg 290. Also consider the question Prof K asks her: "Then [some philosophers] claim that the propositions 'existence exists' and 'there is a physical world,' are, if not synonymous, two perspectives on the same fact, such that if the first is an axiom, then so is the second. Is any variant of this position consistent with the Objectivist view of axioms and axiomatic concepts?

Rand: "The answer is: no, emphatically. Not consistent in any way whatever. Now let me elaborate. When you say 'existence exist,' you are not saying that the physical world exists, because the literal meaning of the term 'physical world' involves a very sophisticated piece of scientific knowledge at which logically and chronologically you would have to arrive much latter." ITOE, pg245-46.

Do you know of anything that exists and has identity that is not physical?

The folks who think reality is or can be partly nonphysical often point to various abstractions: free will, consciousness, qualia, etc. Again, I disagree with Rand and instead think that these things supervene on the physical, if they exist at all.

-Jordan

Post 65

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 10:02pm

Jordan,

Screeeeeeeech!!!

Woah theah hossey!

I just read that post several times to make sure I understood it correctly. So let's make sure we are talking about the same thing.

As you stated, her words:

... if by 'material' we mean that of which the physical objects on the perceptual level are made--'material' in the normal perceptual meaning of the word.

Then she gives an example of subatomic particles. Well, subatomic particles can be studied and manipulated by instruments that increase human perception, so she is not really saying that "existence" is somehow non-existence also. (Also, the subatomic particles that cannot yet be so studied and handled are pure speculation for the time being - possibilities, not yet facts.)

She is merely stating here that there are many things that do exist that we don't know about yet because we do not have direct perceptual contact with them - not that they are unknowable when we use our limited "physically based" sensation-percept-concept faculty of reasoning.

Also, accepting existence (an axiom) before arriving at a definition of "physical" makes sense to me, without negating the physicality of existence or proposing the need for a "nonphysical" state of existence. It all depends on (1) accepting existence to include all things, including concepts like time, and (2) how you later define "physical."

Ayn Rand used the words "physical" and "material" in those quotes with the extremely limited meanings of being directly accessible to human perception.

To propose that consciousness can exist without a physical presence is the same thing as stating that disembodied spirits exist - except you call this state consciousness and make it temporary. To claim that it exists non-physically but has to inhabit a physical shell (brain) borders on the ludicrous.

That takes a lot of faith.

And that is another way of claiming primacy of consciousness.

I hold that whoever proposes that Ayn Rand meant that simply twisted her words around and expanded her own stated definitions to mean what they didn't.

Michael

Post 66

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:26pm

Michael,
I'll write more on this later and more clearly, separating out clearly what I think and what I think Rand said or believed vs what her view would have to entail in order to be consistent.
In the interim, I believe
a) implicit in your statements/thinking is the premise: to exist is to be physical ... which begs the question
(I base this on your surprise and bafflement that any rational naturalist i.e. this one world(ist) is the only real one could not regard your view as obviously correct -- and yes, this is speculation about your mental processes to some degree. Also I base this guess on your insistence that the alternative is to believe in some kind of mysticism.)

b) the alternative is not (at least I don't yet see any compelling reason) to believe in ghosts or any form of mystical hoo-doo.

c) there are compelling (whether correct or not, I'm not yet sure) arguments in favor of the view that 'mental' things are in important ways irreducible: (Jordon alluded to some -- meaning some mental things not some arguments) pain, seeing red, love, anger, justice, conciousness, intelligence, and so forth.

d) I agree that none of the things listed in (c) can exist in the absence of a great many physical things/processes/etc. I don't yet see that this necessarily leads to the conclusion that they are, in some sense, in the end 'nothing but' physical.

I know this is inadequate but I've already expended more time and brain juice (just kidding guys, I know that's physical) on this subject than is good for my writing just now. So I'm going to have to leave it there for a few days.

Post 67

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:32pm

Jordan:

I find your view mostly reasonable, but this might be because it already largely coincides with mine. I'm somewhat familiar with information processing and the use of computers as models for the human mind. Perhaps where we differ is that you seem to be coming from a naive realist position (if you're familiar with that term, then you'll know it's not meant to be insulting)

I'm not a naive realist by most definitons.
Nor a direct realist, per the definitions linked to below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%EFve_realism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Realism
(Wikipedia definitions as of May 09, 2005)

In that latter definition, it describes "representationalism [as the] claim that we are directly aware only of internal representations of the external world."

At the level of our higher consciousness, that's the representationalist view I take. Our sensory organs are "directly aware" of radiation, molecular shape, chemical reaction, etc., but from perceptions on up the chain our brains represent the world in encoded form, with correspondency between the representational models and their external world or conceptual analogs (for concepts based upon concepts).

, while I tend to approach science (which is what I think we're dealing with here) from a largely pragmatic/instrumentalist position. Although, perhaps you're instrumentalist too, just using naive realist exposition. <shrug> Too big a distraction to discuss here though. I will say that I think computer models, though very useful, do have their limits, as does representationalism. But I'll save that discussion for another thread.

I'll wait until you define that before commenting. I resist school-of-philosophy labels in the absense of specific definitions, because they all seem to come in a variety of flavors, and I don't have nearly as much interest in the history of philosophy as in the body proper of philosophy itself.

Nathan Hawking

Post 68

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:43pm

Michael,

I�m not sure how much of this disagreement is semantic.

Mental phenomena are not physical. They are impossible without the firings of neurons in a physical brain, but this fact does not equate them to the firings.

If �hate� turns out to �be� a dollop of calcium, twice as much phosphorus, plus a quarter-volt negative charge�will you be prepared to say that THAT is hate?

An alien incapable of emotion will be brought no closer to understanding what you and I experience as hate by being shown a chart with calcium, phosphorus and charge symbols. Mental phenomena may attend physical brain actions, but they are distinct from the actions from which they arise.

The actions inside a brain are physical; the mental phenomena (consciousness as such) produced by those actions are (is) not.

Jon

Post 69

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:45pm

Nathan,
It's late and this may be a lame question, but as I understand the terms this is key:

Given, for the sake of argument, that these 'representations' exist, are they what we are aware of, or are they the means by which we are aware of things 'outside the mind', e.g. trees and so forth. The former is 'representationalism' as defined in most philosophy books, the latter some form of realism.

Post 70

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:51pm

Jeff,

Sorry to jump right on this, but you caught me still up and the juices flowing.

Every one of the examples you mentioned can be physically measured: "pain, seeing red, love, anger, justice, consciousness, intelligence"

that is, if you include things like measuring brain waves, and allow for this to still be a field in its infancy. (Justice is probably the hardest presently on that list...)

I have dabbled with brain entrainment and, in the other thread. I linked to an interesting research paper on some practical uses:

There is a study on microwave and ultrasound remote word transmission - and remote mechanical thought reading - that frankly scares the holy bejeezus out of me. There are registered patents on some of the things mentioned, not to mention the involvement of a vast array of organizations with differing agendas. This study gives very practical examples of some ways the physical properties of thoughts in living brains can be handled - in reality and not just in theory.

... (from another post in the same thread):

Did you see how many heavyweights are out there doing that stuff? This is not about "mental manipulation" in the traditional sense. It is about putting physical "things" ("mental units" - concepts, but measured and manipulated according to one sense only for the time being) into the brain and reading such things remotely. This is much different than truth serum. This is Big Brother for real.

While we debate whether or not ideas have a physical form in our brains, those guys out there are merrily going about their business inventing how to physically insert and delete ideas in our heads. I repeat, physically.

That is one hell of a wake up call to get real.

So I still contend that, unless you want to restrict the word "physical" like Rand did to direct human perception, any other "reality" will be pretty hard to explain. And all this will become academic shortly anyway once the new devices in that study (which are about as "physical" as it gets) become widespread.

Michael

Edit - Jon, our posts crossed. You wrote:

Mental phenomena are not physical. They are impossible without the firings of neurons in a physical brain, but this fact does not equate them to the firings.

If �hate� turns out to �be� a dollop of calcium, twice as much phosphorus, plus a quarter-volt negative charge�will you be prepared to say that THAT is hate?

That is only part of the story - because this science is still so young. As long as we are going to speculate for the time being, why not speculate that we are still in the process of discovering how to physically measure something like hate, instead of saying that it does not physically exist?

Once you kill its physical vessel (the brain), it all goes away. How can that be if it is not physical also? And what confines it to that physical vessel during life anyway? Something physical maybe?

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 5/10, 12:01am)

Post 71

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:53pm

Jeff:

c) there are compelling (whether correct or not, I'm not yet sure) arguments in favor of the view that 'mental' things are in important ways irreducible: (Jordon alluded to some -- meaning some mental things not some arguments) pain, seeing red, love, anger, justice, conciousness, intelligence, and so forth.

d) I agree that none of the things listed in (c) can exist in the absence of a great many physical things/processes/etc. I don't yet see that this necessarily leads to the conclusion that they are, in some sense, in the end 'nothing but' physical.

I think I'll just make a single statement on this issue, then let it go at that, unless someone finds a flaw in my formulation. To my thinking, this is much ado about nothing.

In my view, all existents can be described as:

1. Physical, which includes all forms of matter and energy and phenomena arising from the nature of these, like space-time.

2. Organization, pattern and process, all of which is conveyed by the physical world or other subpatterns.

It should be said that these are not mutually exclusive, but mutually inclusive. In other words, the physical cannot exist without the organizational, and the organizational ultimately depends upon the physical as a medium.

Nathan Hawking

Post 72

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 11:59pm

Jordan:

I think I'm like Nathan in that I think all mental processes are ultimately physical. Actually, I think everything "supervenes" on the physical, and I think mental stuff like "percepts" are really just patterns in the physical. I suspect percepts are more diffuse than neurons are, but that's fairly irrelevant. I should mention that it might be useful to talk about percepts in nonphysical terms, but that's my instrumentalism creeping in.

My view is slightly more complicated than "ultimately physical," but only slightly. I think the physical is codependent with another property.

My post to Jeff (71 in this thread) lays it out rather concisely. See what you think.

Nathan

(Edited by Nathan Hawking on 5/10, 1:03am)

Post 73

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 12:19am

Jon:

I'll presume to butt in.

I�m not sure how much of this disagreement is semantic.

Mental phenomena are not physical. They are impossible without the firings of neurons in a physical brain, but this fact does not equate them to the firings.

I divide things into two categories, the physical and the organizational, each of which are borne by aspects of the other. (See my post 71 in this thread for a concise explanation.)

My position is that mental phenomena are both, physical and organizational. (Organization superimposed upon the physical, and organization of organizational subprocesses.)

If �hate� turns out to �be� a dollop of calcium, twice as much phosphorus, plus a quarter-volt negative charge�will you be prepared to say that THAT is hate?

I have a thought experiment I've often called The Frog in the Blender, to illustrate the precise difference between the living and the dead: organization.

One might do that same experiment as The Hateful Jerry Springer Guest in a Blender. Set the blender to frappe, press "on" and watch for one minute. Now, where is the hatred? Gone. What's changed? All the chemicals are still there--what's different is the organization. Nothing more.

An alien incapable of emotion will be brought no closer to understanding what you and I experience as hate by being shown a chart with calcium, phosphorus and charge symbols. Mental phenomena may attend physical brain actions, but they are distinct from the actions from which they arise.

The actions inside a brain are physical; the mental phenomena (consciousness as such) produced by those actions are (is) not.

Many will read this as some formulation of "spirituality." (Perhaps that IS how you mean it?)

I would say instead: Mental phenomena are physical/organizational.

Nathan Hawking

Post 74

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 1:01am

Jeff:

It's late and this may be a lame question, but as I understand the terms this is key:

Given, for the sake of argument, that these 'representations' exist, are they what we are aware of, or are they the means by which we are aware of things 'outside the mind', e.g. trees and so forth. The former is 'representationalism' as defined in most philosophy books, the latter some form of realism.

I'll summarize the chain of events:

Sensory cells detect photons, molecules, electromagnetic fields (solidity), etc. These are all indications of some aspect of an existent's properties.
Sensory cells translate their experience into electrical and chemical analogs of their experiences and transmit these. Note that sensory cells do not send the photons or the existent's molecules--they send a translation of these.

We are at a representation only one step removed from the sensory cell's experience.
Perceptions conceptually compare the ORGANIZATION and CONTENT of these sensory representations with existing templates and identify-categorize the sensory components into meaningful mental patterns. Images, for example, are managed in the visual cortex, one of whose principle functions is pattern recognition.
At some point in the processing, the representation is passed on to our conscious awareness.

So, it is representations all the way up the line, from sensory cell output to conscious awareness. We are not consciously "seeing" the thing. We are not even consciously seeing the photons which bounced off the thing--they were converted into other energy forms in the retina. What we are consciously "seeing" is a differentiated, integrated, categorized representation, a mental model, of the photons which were reflected from the object.

My advice to those who posit "direct" perception: It doesn't happen. Get over it.

Lest anyone doubt this, let them explain those who are physically seeing objects--with everything working well through the visual cortex processing, but are still unable to consciously "see" the objects the rest of their brains are seeing. Or those who see perfectly but are unable to interpret what they are seeing.

As I understand your question, Jeff, the answer to BOTH is yes. It's a chain, and if you hold a literal chain with me pulling the other end, I'm "pulling your hand," but I'm also "pulling the chain." Am I "directly" pulling you, or not? Semantics.

Nathan Hawking

Post 75

Monday, May 9, 2005 - 9:16pm

MSK
>Ayn Rand wrote reams of stuff against the mind/body dichotomy. Of course she thinks percepts and concepts are physical "things" - she called them "mental units" and they are created, held and manipulated physically inside a living brain in this reality.

Jeff:
>I believe, based on her view of consciousness as irreducible, (as well as lots of her writings),that she would probably not regard percepts nor concepts as physical.

OK. Michael I think you're wrong here, and Jeff is right.

I'll background the problem briefly. What you're saying is that everything is *physical* - concepts, consciousness, entities etc. This is known, unsuprisingly, as "physicalism". Your problem is, however, that if everything is physical, then everything is *determined*. That is, the thoughts in your brain are simply chemical and electrical reactions, all in principle, physically predictable down to the last detail. Unfortunately, this means therefore *there is no such thing as free will*. This is called *determinism*, and is one of the classic problems of philosophy.

So extreme physicalism entails extreme determinism. As Rand was a believer in free will, she could not accept determinism, and consequently had to believe consciousness was *non-physical*.

Of course, she rarely stated her position coherently, nor supplied much in the way of arguments for it, so there is much confusion within Objectivism about this fundamental issue. But with a close reading of the IOE you can sort of winkle it out:

(Words and Concepts)
...AR:"I want to stress this; it is a very important distinction. A great
number of philosophical errors and confusions are created by failing to
distinguish between consciousness and existence -- between the process of
consciousness and the reality of the world outside, between the perceiver
and the perceived...."

See, in distinguishing between strongly "consciousness" and "existence", she's making this point, even tho it is not felicitously phrased. By existence she actually means *physical* reality (otherwise she'd be saying consciousness does not exist!...;-)).

Anyway, bottom line, if you want to have free will, you cannot be a physicalist. Incidentally, if "abstract" is the opposite of "physical", when you are "abstracting", what do you think you are doing?

- Daniel

Post 76

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 5:58am

Daniel,

Your problem is, however, that if everything is physical, then everything is *determined*. That is, the thoughts in your brain are simply chemical and electrical reactions, all in principle, physically predictable down to the last detail.

That sure is one hell of a leap and arbitrary logical connection you made there.

Just because all physical things that that exist have a specific nature (even consciousness, if it is physical), that does not mean that the nature of one thing will have the nature or characteristics of another. Volition can be just as much a characteristic as random movement can.

In this "simply chemical and electrical reactions" equation of yours, you left out one of the most important elements, life.

Consciousness itself actually could be considered as a characteristic of a living brain - not the other way around, as it would be if consciousness were not physical. Stated another way, it is a feature of a certain kind of life. And all life is physical.

When a physical brain dies, the consciousness inside it dies too. Thus consciousness must be physical.

This is as basic a syllogism as one can find. Either reason is based on reality or it is based on some form of disembodied "consciousness."

Your quote from Rand merely reinforces the primacy of existence, stating that existence exists outside of consciousness, not that existence can be derived from consciousness, nor that consciousness can exist without existing.

I am starting to become aware of a weird form of mysticism called "non-physical consciousness" falling in between the cracks of Objectivism that needs to be dealt with. This is pure philosophical poison.

If non-physical consciousness were a fact (and I have no idea of how a fact can exist and not exist), obviously the next step is to search for a non-physical consciousness that doesn't need anything physical like a brain to house it, you know, maybe even a more advanced one - or who knows, maybe even an eternal all-powerful one that can manipulate physical reality at will...

(Egads! Did I hear thunder?)

Michael

Post 77

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 6:38am

Nathan (and probably Michael... hell anyone who reads this),
Once again I'm going to idiotically repeat myself: I can't supply you with an adequate answer, but here are some points.

1. I respectfully submit that it is not just 'semantics' since issues revolving around free will and the validity of our ability to 'know reality as it really is' hinge on the issue. Difficult to see how your 'representationalism', which only gives the theory a more scientific sounding twist by the introduction of photons, cells, etc, differs in any way from the traditional view. (That doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that you are wrong.)

2. The implicit meaning of your 'direct' is, not to introduce 'hot-button' words, Kantian. That is, on your use of the term, in order to have 'direct' perception the external object itself would have to be actually in the mind. This is a subtle form of question begging. Besides, no one (outside of Berkeley perhaps) would assert that 'yeah that's what 'direct' means and I believe this is the way it is.'

3. No one (well almost) denies that perception is a causal process -- and therefore involves a chain of objects and events: the reception of photons at receptors, their conduction along neural pathways, etc. Further, as part of the causal process, we can all agree that the nature of our organs, nervous system, brains, etc (ultimately it's all one thing in a way anyway, isn't it? i.e. an individual person) alters the original input in numerous and complex ways. Awareness is not, to use Kelley's phrase, diaphanous. But, I am aware of none of that. (Though I can discover or learn about it after enough centuries of science.) Those are the means of perception. They are not that of which I am aware.

4. Since it would be foolish, and possibly unfair, to exhort you again to read Kelley, Gibson, Veatch, etc tell ya what I'm gonna do. I'm going to re-re-read them, summarize in greater detail the arguments and get back to you in a couple of weeks. (Assuming it isn't self-sacrificial to do so, of course -- the novel is finished and I may have to spend more time than I presently anticipate on 'post production' issues.)

5. 'Direct' is not hand waving. It's a theory (a hypothesis, if you wish). It may be wrong, but it isn't stupid. I would say that 'pulling my hand' is ambiguously used in your example. Colloquially we understand what you mean when you grab the chain I'm holding and say 'I'm pulling your hand', but you are actually 'pulling a chain I'm holding, that tugs my hand when your hand tugs it'. Of course, you have a legitimate come back of the sort, "Well if I use my hand to grab yours without the chain, it's just electric/quantum mechanical forces between nearby skin molecules attracting one another, followed by ratcheting of certain muscle proteins, etc etc. Therefore there's really no difference. There's no meaningful sense in which I am pulling your hand apart from the 'chain' sense". This is another form of, what I would regard as error, of the sort described in (2).

So, unless I weaken and come back here sooner because I can't resist a good discussion, that's all for now.
I'll see ya in a couple of weeks.

Warmest,
Jeff

Post 78

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 6:46am

Michael,
Very briefly and then I'm off.
1. Rand did not restrict the use of the term 'physical' to 'available via perception'. She knew atoms and other imperceptible physical things existed. I agree with her on this.

2. I don't deny that physical correlates of mental stuff can be measured; brain waves, etc. I question whether this necesarily implies that mental stuff is 'nothing but' or is identical with those things measured. I don't think the difference, either, is 'just semantics'. (Not to imply that you said that.)

3. Respectfully, this is a non-sequiter

"When a physical brain dies, the consciousness inside it dies too. Thus consciousness must be physical"

More later.
Jeff

Post 79

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 7:01am