Yes, we do use our brain to command the rest of our body, and we do that by sending electrical pulses through our nerves.
But, neurons also communicate between each other WITHOUT ever sending pulses to any place outside the brain, and that is actually what composes most of our brain activity.
How would you explain the brain communicating WITH ITSELF if we only use pulses to control our body, and thoughts are a whole different thing?
See, what I was saying about assumptions…
Obviously it’s not a “religion versus science” argument. Its a philosophical argument, even within the scientific community. Science does not have a complete hypothesis for mind/brain interaction, therefore even among scientists there are varying interpretations of the available evidence. Materialism is probably the majority viewpoint among scientists, which isn’t at all surprising considering that Science deals exclusively with material questions. But the point it that materialism isn’t as much as a scientific theory, let alone a “real proved fact.” Until neuroscience advances to the point where these questions are able to be studied, the nature of “thoughts” is going to be a philosophical question.
afaik the scientists know that the brain works with electrical impulses and that our thoughts are electrical impulses too, but they don’t know how it’s “encoded”.
I’d like to see the details of that survey. Just because 38% said they didn’t believe in God doesn’t mean that the other 62% do. It could easily mean they declined the question etc. And they could have just asked 50 people. Y’see how statistics don’t always work? Find me the details of that survey, and then I might believe that it’s debated in the scientific community.
Like I said it’s basically is a religion versus science debate. Maybe a more accurate description would be spirituality versus science. Yet again with the semantics.
Also, I’m unsure what you mean by mind/brain interaction? Isn’t that making a massive assumption that the mind is a separate entity? If that’s the case, then it’s not surprising that scientists don’t have a hypothesis for it, because it’s not scientific.
I understand how you can believe in that mattemuse, since I know a few people personally who also think like that, but I just don’t see any sense in it.
Not to offend you or anything, but there are certain religions who do not believe in blood transfusion or organ transplants for example, when we all know that these are procedures that save people’s lives everyday, and their benefits are 100% scientific proven. We can all choose to believe something or not, but when it surpasses all known evidence and becomes simply blind faith, I tend to be skeptical about it.
I know this is not your case, since the whole brain functionality is still a mistery to us, but through the use of new technologies such as PET scans, we are progressing really fast on that subject. So in 10 or 20 years it could indeed be your case 
.
Click on the link I posted. “Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed 1,646 faculty members at elite research universities, asking 36 questions about belief and spiritual practices.” If you are the ultimate believer in all things scientific that you seem to be, questioning statistical mathematics when you don’t like the outcome makes you appear to be a massive fucking hypocrite.
If “scientists” can be religious, and they can, its not “basically religion versus science.” Its not “spirituality versus science” either. Saying “the mind is greater than the sum of its parts” is not a religious or spiritual viewpoint, it just accepts the possibility of an answer which science doesn’t yet have an explanation for.
the “mind” in “mind/brain interaction” refers to mental states, thoughts, emotions, personality, etc. The phrase itself isn’t making any assumptions whatsoever. Talk about semantics…
Believe in what? I haven’t posted my viewpoint in this thread. I’m merely making the point that the secular debate between materialism and dualism exists and that certain posters’ continual ignoring of this fact is a perfect example of why trying to discuss religion on scientific terms (or science on religious terms) is pointless.
All right, calm yourself. Until your post, this was a fairly non-confrontational thread.
I see your point, and it’s fair enough. I did go on the link, but didn’t scan it fully. Also, I’m always wary of statistics, whatever the outcome of it since it’s often either misquoted, badly carried out or biased in some way or other.
Saying “the mind is greater than the sum of its parts” is a faith-based argument as it is an assumption based upon nothing.
Well, that was only my first semantic slip-up, and I think quite justified considering that you had been talking about minds and brains as separate things.
statistics aren’t right everytime.
best example are 2 surveys with 1000 participants about the same topic: internet censorship within 2 days in germany.
At the first day they got a result, that 92% of the germans want a internet censorship because of childporn and one day after a new survey from the same company said that 96% are against it.
It’s a matter of the questions.
I would like to add here what everyone knows first appeared at the Big Bang. It was energy. Energy as we all know cannot be created nor destroyed nor can it self-destruct. Some people call energy God. Some don’t. Christians say that God created space and time and that is when energy appeared on the scene of the Big Bang.
Now then, let me show you what evolution cannot explain (mind you, I believe in theistic evolution, intelligent design is pure hogwash to me):
You see, evolution can only explain the origin of the species. The best that atheists/agnostics can come up with about consciousness is that it is a cognitive illusion. As for morals, evolution still struggles with altruism.
To end this conversation, I give you two websites filled with quotes from two Christian scientists who believe in God-guided evolution, Kenneth Miller and Theodosius Dobzhansky.
Evolution struggles with altruism? Obviously you didn’t see that video I posted earlier.
Evolution can explain all those things. If you just think about it, is it more likely for an organism to survive if it can react to incoming information/stimuli?
Yes.
Is it more likely a human will survive/propagate the species if they work as a team?
Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg
There is the video I posted. Watch it, you’ll find out some interesting things about human evolution.
Also looks like Kenny likes pianos. lol
True. After all, natural selection as we all know is the unconscious, blind watchmaker. It has no goal and that shows us that there is no origin of life needed. After watching the video that intooblivion posted, I can see the athiest viewpoint. Religion is like the blanket that Linus in the Charlie Brown cartoons holds on to and never lets go. If we get rid of religion, we lose that attachment and we have a hard time coping with the withdrawal. While that video was enlightening, the only way I will stop believing in God completely is if I take part in a flatliner experiment and I do annihilate (cease to exist) at the time of death and someone brings me back to life with the paddles saying CLEAR. Oh and by the way, in case people didn’t know this, Charles Darwin lost his faith in God completely when his 10-year old daughter died as Charles could not believe in a loving God anymore and decided that natural diseases killed her instead of the devil or some other spiritual/metaphysical explanation.
Strange that you say watchmaker. You weren’t alluding to the watch maker argument are you? Because it’s a load of shite.
How can you look down at a watch, see that it’s designed because it’s complex (even though there’s never been known that watches occur naturally without a designer) amongst nature which makes it different, and then say nature is also designed.
So basically it’s like saying “Oh look, a watch in a forest made of watches, lying on ground made of watches. This watch is somehow special and obviously designed, because throughout my entire life I’ve only seen watches made by people and none that grow on trees!”
It’s not like natural selection is random, “blind” and “unconcious”. Natural selection guides evolution to make the organism more apt for survival. I’d hardly call that blind when that’s all it’s ever done, is make organisms better.
Natural selection IS random, “blind” and “unconcious”, that’s part of it’s very meaning.
For every mutation that actually “works”, as in, it increases the chances of an individual’s survival, there are millions that fail and lead only to the individual’s death.
I think he means it isn’t blind and unconscious in that it invariably leads to an advantage, rather than a few extra limbs that don’t work, for example.
The thing is, it might actually lead to an extra not functional limb, if it doesn’t affect the specie’s survival.
If such a creature managed to reproduce and constitute a whole line of descendants, then there’s no reason for the species not to prosperate. But, you can’t call it a “successful mutation”, since it didn’t really bring any benefits to such creature as far as surviving goes, and you can’t call it an “evolutionary failure” either.
No, I was not referring to the watchmaker argument. I agree with you that the watchmaker argument is crap. I was referring to Richard Dawkin’s words about natural selection in his book “The Blind Watchmaker: Why The Evidence of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design”. He says that if “natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discovered–has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.” These are the words on the back of his book. Richard Dawkins (the most famous atheist of this modern era, it seems) is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Hey if it was intelligent, people would be able to get all the awesome modifications they want thanks to evolution.
I wouldn’t say dualism is an assumption based on “nothing,” but I agree that it is an assumption. Materialism is also an assumption, since it has yet to be empirically proven. Which brings me full circle to my original point: arguments against religion using science as “proof,” as well as arguments against science using religion as “proof,” always rest upon assumptions which render them useless (because you end up debating the assumptions rather than the argument).
The thing is though we don’t really “assume” science, we use the scientific process to prove things empirically.
Brain activity appears, to all possible means of detection currently available, to be completely linked to ‘thought’ on a one-to-one basis. The relationship in detail is not yet understood, true. But until there is a even a single piece of evidence that thought can exist independently of brain activity, believing that it can is a large and baseless assumption, albeit not one that can be disproved. Because as I tried to say earlier, it’s impossible to prove a negative. We could study braindead coma patients for a million years and find no evidence of thought, but we still can’t say that proves there’s no thought in a braindead person because there’s no way of knowing for sure that tomorrow there won’t suddenly be some evidence in the form of a braindead person developing the ability to use poltergeist activity to write something down or whatever. That’s why the burden of proof is on the assertion that something exists or is possible, not on the alternative that it doesn’t or is impossible, because they are logically unprovable. So if dualism implies that thought is possible without brain activity, then the only logical response is to remain sceptical until some evidence is presented.
As for God, it’s true that there can never be such a thing as evidence that some form of undetectable, intangible, omnipotent being didn’t or doesn’t exist outside of the realms of human understanding. But as yet He hasn’t provided any decent evidence for his existence either, so there’s exactly as much evidence in support of that as there is to support that the Giant Flying Spaghetti monster created the universe, or that we all exist in some author’s mind on the real Earth, or that no supernatural will was involved at all in the creation of the universe but some as yet poorly understand natural process (like the ekpyrotic theory). As above, there’s no way to prove that God, the Spaghetti monster, the Author don’t exist, but certainly no evidence that they do either. Since there’s nothing to choose between any of those beliefs in terms of provability, I tend not to believe any of them (but certainly not in any kind of supernatural entity - I don’t see anything more reasonable in any of the Gods of the religions of the world than the Flying Spaghetti monster), but remain interested in the theories of physicists because at the very least I have more respect for the scientific method of trying to find out what’s what and prove your theory with some evidence than in simply accepting that the answer is something I’m told by what someone wrote down in a Holy book or someone who’s had some unlikely revelation.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.