Your unconscious is in charge ...

Started by Baruch, August 26, 2019, 10:39:27 AM

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Blackleaf

Quote from: Ricardo on October 02, 2019, 02:37:11 PM
Is consciousness immortal?

No. The consciousness comes from the brain. When the brain is influenced, the consciousness is affected. Logically, then, no brain means no consciousness. The idea of an immortal soul is just silly. Apply Occam's Razor and cut out the fat. The soul isn't necessary to understanding consciousness, it explains nothing, and it runs contrary to what we know.
"Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound."
--Fulke Greville--

Baruch

#16
Quote from: Blackleaf on October 02, 2019, 04:34:16 PM
No. The consciousness comes from the brain. When the brain is influenced, the consciousness is affected. Logically, then, no brain means no consciousness. The idea of an immortal soul is just silly. Apply Occam's Razor and cut out the fat. The soul isn't necessary to understanding consciousness, it explains nothing, and it runs contrary to what we know.

Correct, from the materialist POV.  There is nothing called metaphysics for them.  I could reduce my hypotheses to a minimum also, assume that people aren't conscious.  Behaviorism (old psych theory) had that POV for years in US medical practice.  For Behaviorists, if you can't see it, then it doesn't exist.  Nobody can see a thought, so ... but currently we have better scanners, sensors etc ... we can now see various physical things going on in your head.  But how they connect to particular thoughts (other than subjectively) is unknown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

B F Skinner from the 1950s was the most famous regarding this stimulus-response theory, and mice in a maze.  Some still believe this, we had a management book at work called "Who Stole My Cheese" that reuses that meme.  The current fad in American psychology is ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_psychology

Behaviorism was inspired by mid-19th century ideas about reflexes.  Cognitive Psychology was inspired by mid-20th century ideas about systems engineering.  Any system so far, is incapable of dealing with all aspects of human behavior, but may be useful for some kinds.

The broader field of cognitive science tries to include more than just human psychology but classic AI.  What do problem solving systems both biological and non-biological have in common?  Unfortunately this has lead to crashing Teslas on auto-pilot ;-(

In general, reductionism means, make enough assumptions to trivialize the system (in particular any part-to-part interactions) so it is tractable.  Then try to scale up to more realistic models.  Like ... start with atoms, then try to design an earthworm from the bottom up.  The complexity of that is COMPLEXITY.
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