Re: Does violating the laws of physics require intelligence?

On Jan 27, 3:09 pm, Treus <treusd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
leland.mcin...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jan 27, 1:48 pm, Treus <treusd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Timberwoof wrote:
In article
<c86ac763-0ba8-42ff-8ceb-2a220b919...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Treus <treusd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Timberwoof wrote:

Consciousnees is an illusion created by all the parts of the brain
working at the same time, receiving, processing, weighing and storing
information, making decisions and doing things.

Okay, that is what you believe, Do you have an empirical basis for
that belief? If so, what is it (with citations, of course)?

You're playing a nice game here, but you won't win. You make a
statement,. We rebut it. You ask us to prove our rebuttals. As we are
sure of our rebuttals, we are happy to provide references. (I'm grumpy
right now so I will just throw my vast collection of back issues of
Scientific American at you.) and then you will somehow dismiss each one
as insufficient.

Because insufficient is exactly what they have been. You haven't made
a case yet, only filled thread space. When I ask for your evidence
that the brain is _sufficient_ for the mind, you merely provide
evidence that the brain is _necessary_ for the mind. See the
difference?

There are certainly plenty of explanations as to how the brain may
provide a sufficient explanation for the mind. Try "Consciousness
Explained" by Daniel Dennett, or "The Illusion of Conscious Will" by
Daniel Wegner for some description and discussion combined with
excellent citations of primary literature. They are, of course,
conjectural explanations, and we don't have iron-clad empirical proof
that this is indeed how things work, we only have evidence that
continues to concur with such models. By the same token we don't have
iron-clad empirical proof that gravity works by spacetime curvature,
just evidence that continues to concur with the theories and models
that claim that.

So yes, you're quite right that we don't know for certain that the
brain provides sufficient explanation for the mind, there's always
uncertainty -- but that's true of pretty much any proposition you care
to put forward.

Which is why the key term is "sufficiency" and not "certainty".

And uner the banner of sufficiency the books I pointed you toward
provide descriptions of how the brain can be deemed to be sufficient
to explain consciousness. How certain we are in that explanation is a
point you can quibble on, but that a sufficient explanation is
provided, well, if you would just care to actually read the books...

We're not certain that gravity works the way we think
it does either.

No, but we can _test_ our supposed sufficient causality for producing
the phenomena for gravity. The inverse square law is easy to
demonstrate. This does not mean we have "figured everything out" about
gravitation. However it does mean we can show, not just in our
imagination but also in the real world, how our force can be
manifested exclusively in terms of observables. In the case of the
mind and brain, we have a huge incommensurability of types of
phenomena, and yet we're supposed to assume one is sufficient to cause
the other, no experiments necessary.

There's only a huge incommensurability in types of phenomena if you
care to ignore the explanations of how the requisite phenomena can be
explained and made commensurate. Are the explanations/models perfect?
No. Are they certain? No. But they do what you want, and we can
continue to make observations and tests with regard to whether they
appear sufficient for producing the observable phenomena -- so far
they've held up very well. If you can provide some phenomena that they
don't explain, then please tell us...

We have cobjectural models, and we have evidence, but
there's still uncertainty. Which means we're really just discussing
degrees of uncertainty. Our understanding and empirical observation of
gravity is better than our understanding and empirical observation of
minds, so there's less uncertainty with regard to gravity... but
still, given that there's plenty of evidence in concordance with
materialist models of mind,

Except, of course, for even the bare minimum _description_ of the mind
in materialistic terms.

[snip]

Can you even define what you mean by "mind" in exclusively material
terms? Apparently not.

Read the books I cited,
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett,
"The Illusion of Conscious Will" by Daniel Wegner
and throw in
"I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter
and get back to me. I don't care to type out what has been already
been more eloquently explained, but they variously provide
descriptions of mind in material based terms (as well as citations to
the more detailed primary literature). That is, they are cites
providing what you're looking for.

For extra credit you can try work by Ramachandran which I've heard is
good, but haven't read myself.

.

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