h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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<>I still think placebos are useful and it would be great to work out how to get over your issues with placebos to make them 'acceptable' because they do have a place...<

In what way does dishonesty have a place in modern medicine? >

Can we take up this convo up in a few weeks. My brain isn't in gear for anything too deep and worthwhile!

It is interesting though about medical people lying...Drs lie a lot when people are near to death etc so as not to stress the patient etc. Is that much different from lying about placebos that a) will not make them worse and b) may make them better,,,until next time some time!

Back to shooting fish in a barrel...rather than Effers the Eel in a swimming pool.

In reply to post 2379:

RC: Yet as the Bible states, there comes a time when the conscience is finally seared (see 1 Tim. 4:1,2).

F: You mean as Timothy states. He's the one who says that women must not be teachers. Do you agree with that too?


Nah. That would be Paul, writing to Timothy.

TRiG.

And now back to the backlog.

Hi Taff,
Apparently the commandment is Thou shalt not commit murder and not thou shalt not kill.

I was told as a boy that it was thou shalt not kill, which has buggered up my life a bit. You see I wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force but was told in the Cadets that they would ask "how do you feel about dropping bombs on people" brainwashed into the commandment being thou shalt not kill sort of put me in a quandary so I didn't go for it.

For the definition of murder see "I Robot" if you miss it at least you'll have seen a good film. It's something to do with one human killing another.

The they I referred to was soul or spirit. Which were the last two nouns in the preceding sentence. And that was acceptable and correct grammar when I was at school, 30 years ago.

I keep my hair short but not shaven. My hair grows in so many peculiar directions that the simultaneous lengthening of my hair resulted in a quite hideous, quasi-afro. Now I know it's time to visit the barbers when the tufts touch the top of my ears.

Onto the serious stuff.

I'm currently reading a book all about consciousness via cognitive psychology and just a dash of, as is my preference, philosophy. Damned fascinating it is too. No mention of souls (unsurprisingly) but lots of stuff about dualism and how to overcome it.

And Doc, I'm going to quote you, for three reasons:

1) to show you how it's done, in a nice, friendly manner.

and

2) because this being the WORLD wide web, some (transatlantic or antipodean) researchers who read the backlog of our conversations while we are all asleep, like to keep track of who is reply to who. When it's a specific post, courtesy if nothing else mandates that you take the time and effort to include the post number you are replying to and the relevant text in either quotation marks or chevrons. This is so a) the reply has some context b) there's no chance of you being misquoted. As happens, some contentious opinions go whizzing about in a thread like this and it's of no help to anyone if a rebuttal is made to which the offended party replies "that's not what I said." (Believe me: it happens)
So we cover ourselves by making it plain and obvious to all and sundry what was said and that our replies are both fair and contextual.

finally,

3) It's taken me so long to write this reply it's now waaaay out of order from where it will appear so having a fixed referent to link back to helps those of us who read each post that comprises the backlog.

So, Doc you said (3090)

>>I believe that the Soul and Consciousness are linked somehow <<
>>I also believe that everything has a soul or spirit<<

Do you mean literally *everything* eg. trees, rocks, telegraph poles etc? or just things that are alive, cats, cows, chickens etc? That's not an obtuse question, I'm just not sure how you mean to define "everything".

Assuming it's the latter, do I take it therefore you think cows, cats and chickens are conscious?

That's not necessarily controversial - but if so, do you think that all animals are likewise conscious, for if as you imply, the state of being conscious and being ensouled are "linked"
and this by definition, I'm assuming includes animals, do you have an explanation for what consciousness means for other creatures and moreover, if there is a distinction to be drawn between different levels of consciousness, is there a corresponding differentiation in the type of soul?

More importantly I want to address the first of those twin claims: I think consciousness should not be thought of as a literal stage of understanding, analogous to a theatre upon which the objects of consciousness received from the sense are paraded and understood by an audience composed of the self. This kind of idea of an inner observer goes back centuries but has no rational or logical basis. What modern studies of neurology teach us is that the brain is a modular organ which does the job of representing; hearing; vision etc, and what seems to be the case is that our representations of our experience are not the operation of a self (like a homunculus, nestled inside the pineal gland) but is the activity of the various modal parts of the brain acting and interacting simultaneously and that's it. Now see Descartres thought as you do (well sort of - he was less forgiving to animals) in that he thought the place where the soul/consciousness interacted with (if we are generous) we can call signals from the body was the pineal gland which I've just made mention of is a gland in moreorless the centre of the brain ideally suited to imagine it as the control centre for our 'selves'

Now if I've understood you, I hesitate to make such a grandiose claim but humour me, then you think presumably something of us survives death as a 'soul'; you also think soul and consciousness are linked - so is it too much of a stretch that what you think survives death is our consciousness? Well assuming that's more or less your position, it follows that you think there is a unitary self and that this unitary self, which survives death, is the soul/consciousness.

Now if I mapped that out clearly (I hope you see now the purpose of clear quotation) it just remains for me to point out that the concept of a unitary self cocevied as a dualism between mind/soul and body has no evidentiary basis and more over is philosophically imprecise. Not that we don't have an experience of our self but in what our selves consist in not a unitary coming together of different streams of sensory input toward an internal editor, but is just the stream of consciousness active in modular areas of the brain representing those things of which we are conscious. For example - you must recognise ths phenomenon - the way you can become aware of a ticking clock - it always was ticking, the sound waves were entering your ear, in 'becoming aware of the ticking sound' you were becoming conscious of it, in that while always actively processing the decoded sound, in the narrative stream of consciousness no attention was paid to it so it was effectively 'edited out' of representation. At least this is what I understand by consciousness. This is my workign definition, I suspect that you are more of the internal editor persuasion, since you think souls and this thing 'consciousness' are linked, so that self and consciousness are conflated.

And this is why it's important and necessary to get a clear understanding of what people mean when they speak of "souls".

Granted it's useful and interesting to explore the kinds of questions about the animls I've lain out above but that's kind of trivial IMO, where it gets interesting is how souls are supposed to interact in bodies.

Presumably you think you have a soul; presumably you have some idea of in what souls consist of - you haven't gone as far as to say what physical or non-physical properties souls might have, (for the record my idea of consciousness is firmly rooted in a materialist concept of the brain) I extend to you the opportunity to you to clarify your working definition. Doing so will outline help one of the perennial questions on this thread, dutifully summarised here: A42586266

Because we who doubt the existence of souls don't know what people mean when they speak of having them or how they survive death or how they contain our selves. It doesn't make sense and I personally can't make sense of it. So we turn to those who profess such beliefs to make plain on what basis they make their determinations.

what little of sub atomic physics I do understand I don't see having making any sort of appeal to the question of souls and consciousness.

And as for Euler, I had to go and look up his equation. Very interesting. I liked it. Quiet beautiful in that way that some equations can be. As a proof or a theorem for God, you've got me stumped but as a rather elegant demonstration of some fundamental ideas in mathematics, it's a winner.


Clive.

>>see 'I robot', [...] you'll have seen a good film<<

I preferred the book of short stories.

Clive, have you been reading Daniel Dennett? That was quite a good summation.

Some writers I think I understand better from others paraphrase.

Yes is the answer. He reflects questions that long ago derailed my own progress in the subject of understanding consciousness; firstly - how does it develop i.e no mention was ever made in the studies at university I read of consciousness for example, in children. It was always the assumed faculties of conscious awareness in adults that were examples.

Secondly my growing appreciation of the material study of the brain reconciling consciousness with other sciences like enurology and the observer paradox in my private readings of quantum physics being a figmant of mathematical cancellation.


Reconciling philosophy of the mind with these twin track problems (development and materialism) was what was occupying my thoughts as I left my Masters degree to look to do something more practical.

Reading Dennet now is enlivening for me for I see much of my own questions dealt with over-coming dualism, leading to a materialist explanation and the idea of development - not explicitly in children but as a process of modular awareness it's not hard to process this in terms of how a developing brain can have developing awareness of environment and self.

I've been wanting to read Dennet for a while, having found his concept of the intentional stance persuasive of assumed dualism, but not knowing much beyond that I felt I should delve a little deeper.

It answers the question of why we don't have memories of our infancy. The brain hadn't organized yet so there was no awareness to remember.

(thanks for the plug, Clive.)




'Because we who doubt the existence of souls don't know what people mean when they speak of having them or how they survive death or how they contain our selves. It doesn't make sense and I personally can't make sense of it. So we turn to those who profess such beliefs to make plain on what basis they make their determinations.'

Very nicely put. I'd like to simply ask doc (or any other soul believers): Have you considered the interaction of soul and body? Do you have any sort of concept of how this might work? Is the soul some sort of pilot for the body? How does the soul tell the body what to do? What is the body's steering wheel, what it's accelerator, what it's brake pedal? What is the physical part or parts of the body which actually interfaces with the soul?

Clive: please read Douglas Hofstadter as well. A brilliant writer, an inconceivably clear thinker, and an absolute artist. If I may say, his prose has more beautiful, immediately humanly meaningful poetry in it than any of the dusty doggerel that gets pointed out in the Bible or the Qu'ran.

Douglas Hofstadter

Read 'I am a Strange Loop' He uses the metaphor of a video camera live feed pointed at the video screen. Or two mirrors facing each other. Except that some small thing is changed, added or subtracted or processed in some way by the neurons with each bounce.

Speigel im spiegel

'godel, escher, bach' is still the most important of his books, I think. Although, 'Le Ton Beau de Marot' is particularly dear to my brain.

Ma mignonne
Je vous donne
Le bonjour
......

not sure how to break this to you but . . .


that should be




'Mon mignon'

if you were adressing me, that is (rather than just quoting m. Marot).

I'll add 'im to the list.

I've now got a pile of to get through (three Dennets and three Steven Pinker's amongst them) but I can append Hofstadter. Anything of theirs in particular I should pay attention to?

I'd lastly like to to point out before I vanish off to bed, in a sort of corollary of Anhaga's questions for Doc, if the soul is assumed to be a "pilot", "in control" as it were of the body, then this is the kind of unity of self which is not found in a present understanding of consciousness. To me this suggests that a soul can not be the same as consciousness. I personally hold there is no such thing as a soul so I perceive no actual conflict. However for those who do (Doc, Warner) if you think soul and consciousness are either linked or indeed one and the same - the presence of one leading to or requiring the other - then you have to explain this difficulty, both on the one hand (Anhaga's questions) how souls interact with the body (assuming you think they do) and I submit humbly my corollary, how if souls and consciousness are linked (if you think they are) one is supposedly unitary and the other not.

actually, Clive, Hofstadter and Dennet collaborated on a volume titled 'The Mind's I' which might be a place to start.

Or it might not be.


I like the two by Hofstadter that I mentioned and for Dennet I like 'Consciousness Explained' and 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea'. And then there's the work of the two Churchlands . . . "Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting."

Ah. Clearly I'm not yet fully up to speed of the complete oeuvre of Dennet.

CE, I'm reading now. DDI and BTS are on the shelf waiting to be read.

That sounds almost Phillip K Dick-ish. circa "A Scanner Darkly"

I first rigourously encountered this whole subject (and the Churchlands) when, during an idle moment as a post-post-graduate in the 80s I took a course titled 'Philosophy of Mind'. I also took one called 'Thanatology'


Concerning the subject line:

I well remember being in a Big Boy burger joint in Mexico City and having my order taken by Jésus himself.

The collective sum of an individuals known processes allows for the reflective correlation of ones expressed being.
Soul is not a master but guardian with gentle hands.

Is not the blatant name dropping of book crude chest beating best left to ape and its kind?