unenlightened wrote:
As to the monkey, you have to see how it develops through the programme, (hopefully the link works now, thanks) I may not have explained it clearly enough.

If you mean "explained by", you would have to include all the other modes of explanation which a necessary to FULLY describe what meaning is, and what mental predicates posit.

I have repeated stated that it can be REdescribed in physics, as in can under many different displines, but each regime of description has its strengths and weaknesses, and none is more "fundamental" than the other.

And neither is mental predicate attribution a natural science.

What would be lost is the answer to "What do you think of the Pieta?" or "Why should we not torture prisoners?"

The answer to these is "information", and it would be missing if we just looked at the brain when asking them. Key to this is understanding that what mental predicates end up pointing us to are the "reasons" behing behavior. And reasons point us to criteria. When people share criteria, they communicate, and thus are able to organize themselves mutally in the world.

First of all, something was lost when Thor disappeared, and that was the communal way of relating to the world which involved the concept of Thor.

Always in descriptions a relationship between oneself, others and the world is implied, and this is nonetheless the case in physical descriptions, as neutral as they attempt to be.

Secondly, and most important, The God Thor and Beliefs, Fears, Desires are not at all equivalent. Indeed if you REALLY believe that "How do you feel about Hilary Clinton" can be, even should be replaced by "What states are your brain in when exposed to images of and words of Hilary Clinton?" I can only laugh.

If you feel that knowing what brain states Shakespeare was in when writing King Lear, and listening to King Lear being read are somehow equivalent, I think you dramatically fail to understand what mental events are and how their posit helps us organize ourselves in the world.

It is not reasonable to say that all the things which mental posits bring out can be brought out by a description of the eletrical discharge of brain matter.

And even if we had such a complete physical descrition of the brain (impossible), it would never give us even the simplest answers to questions such as: "When you were a child did you trust your mother?"

Exactly. This is what I am telling you. We, long ago agreed that one should not confuse the map for the territory. I told you that you regularly do so. Here you are bucking and thrashing against the requirement that whatever you are talking about must be a "map" (description), and not the territory. This is what I am saying: The description of mental predicates cannot be redescribed as brain activity without losing valuable information/distinctions/factors.

When one posits mental predicates, for instance about the beliefs of others, this is not to be gotten at through information "in the brain", that is, through a description of the brain. What about the war still effects you? is not going to be meaningfully answered through a description fo the brain.

There will be no brain state which strictly corresponds to whether Thomas believes the relationship can continue or not. The question simply isn't answered by descriptions of the brain, and the meaningful, and therefore relevant information to be gained comes out of the negotiation of this answer; the result is a prediction of, and an explanation of, behavior. This example is one of the most elementary one could form, whether someone believes "x" or not. In fact, the nature of mental predicates and their powers of information providing are really far more complex and rich than this, and equally "non-convergent".

I have no idea what you mean by "mind" here. Indeed beliefs "interact", that is respond to, other beliefs, fears all the time. You can see the causal relationships between mental predicates all the time.

Also, I have no idea what "sensory imput" is. I do not follow the model of inputs and outputs you seem to imagine makes up mental activity as if it were a computer.

You actually believe that one can "monitor a person's brain" and come up with the fact: He is thinking: "The fathoms of the deep are requisit for every sailor's heart"

(and even perhaps ludicrously enough, know that he spelled "requisite" wrong in his thinking)?

You are lost as to the nature of thought, language meaning if you think this is so.

And I have no idea why you think that it could, other than your sci-fi imagination of a mind-reading machine. People themselves don't always know what they mean, let alone "what they mean" being a fact of the brain's activity.

TecnoTut wrote:

I think Dunamis is saying that although brain states do not lack causal efficacy, brain descriptions alone lack the explanatory value of folk psychology, which I agree with if that is what he means.

Dunamis wrote:

Not at all. Events under biological description can be redescribed under physics, but the answers to question that biology can answer are by and large NOT answered by physics, in particular the nature of teleological function-descriptions which biology specialize in. Further, questions such as: why did species x die out, is not largely a physics question. Physics may help provide answers to such a question, as might chaos theory, or statistics, but the kinds of answers looked in biology for are not entirely made irrelevant by physics.

Dunamis wrote:

Not at all. There is no state of the brain which each time it occurs the words

"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;"

Are shown to be in the mind. The presence of such a thought[s] is not governed in any law-like sense, and this has nothing to do with dualism [of an ontological kind]. The kinds of descriptions which show that such a thought are in the mind simply are not physical, nor are they "physics" nor are they "quantum". One will never, and I say never, look at someones brain and say, "my what a beautiful thought." The reason for this is not trite. The reason is that the "information" that is relevant is social information, that which connects composite human beings, that bundle, to the world, that bundle.

DeathMonkey wrote:

Then what on earth are you talking about? Basically you are just nitpicking everything I say by pointing out that I cannot talk about anything without every term I use being made in reference to some description.

At this point I cannot even figure out what any of this has to do with anything.

Dunamis wrote:

The second thing is that if indeed one does take the metaphor of maps literally, I indeed am saying that one cannot inscribe all the "information" of the mental map onto the physical map of the brain, such that one can simply destroy the mental map and not lose anything that map was describing, providing, enabling, etc. The two "maps" (if given) perform different operations, answer different kinds of questions.

Dunamis wrote:

That you think, for instance, a person studying physics should be able to come up with the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is bizarre.

Dunamis wrote:

There will be no brain state which strictly corresponds to whether Thomas believes the relationship can continue or not.

astaire1 wrote:


Once again, I really do think that there are 2 incompatible positions being discussed here and at this point I'm not sure which side of the issue I will come down on. I want to retain the disctinction between derivable descriptions(maps) and correlated maps. So in this sense I cannot accept Dunamis's stance (unless he can come up with additional arguments that I've not seen yet).

However, I have found Dunamis's arguments to be convincing with regard to Biology vs. Physics being a correlated realtionship rather than a derivable relationship. At the same time, I know many scientists tend to accept that in many specific cases biology can be reduced to physics.

When elan vital was abolished I suppose it was the overwhelming acceptance that absolutely ALL activities occuring inside cells were explainable by interactions between molecules which could in turn be explained by physical laws.

If I have 2 dozen eggs, how many eggs do I have? That is a question that can be answered by multiplication ( 2 x 12 = 24). But multiplication can be entirely reduced to addition 2 x 12 actually means 12 + 12. So once rescribed under the rules of addition (the more fundametal of the 2 concepts), we see that the same question is answered and nothing is lost by the redescription.

Likewise, it is presumed that the attraction between various sections of amino acid chains can be calculated by quantum mechanics. So this provides an alternative (more fundamental) way to describe how each protein molecule will fold up. However, we are already required to invoke huge amounts of presumption and we haven't yet gotten any where near Dunamis' hugely contingent question regarding the causes of various extinctions.

While I am quite satisfied with the support physics provides for cell activity I consider it rather absurd to claim that extinctions could be reformulated under quantum mechanics.


I do agree that there is no single brain state that corresponds to those words but I do tend to assume that there would be a sequence of brain states that corrsponds to those words. Namely, the sequence that occurred in my brain when I read them.

Also, if there was no lawful relationship that caused me to think those words while reading them, you would not have typed them in so confidently assured that such thoughts could be shared.

I largely agree with your connection of a human being to the world. However, as mind theorists, we cannot exclude the scenario where humans go into an isolation tank for minutes or hours (even a few seconds suffices to mometarily sever the connection to the world).


Then what on earth are you talking about? Basically you are just nitpicking everything I say by pointing out that I cannot talk about anything without every term I use being made in reference to some description.

At this point I cannot even figure out what any of this has to do with anything.
I'd say its important that you take on board what could be meant by the notion that humans produce reality by describing it. However, I hasten to add that we're all assuming that reality exists independent of our thoughts about it. However, we can never know for sure when we've hit on a concept that "actually" corresponds to something that genuinely exists in reality. So in some ways, minds are not so much things that "actually" exist in reality. They are more like concepts that we have created to understand the world.


Can you list all the relevant ingredients necessary to account for a persons mind?

Here would be my attempt:
- personal history (but only the part that could be remembered by that person)
- a belief web
- embodiment


I would call it presumptuous rather than bizarre. Both the connotation and the denotation of the word presumptuous would seem to apply here.


I don't agree unless you merely mean that Thomas himself doesn't know. Thomas has been running simulations of the future in his mind to answer the questions of what he believes now and will believe in the future. In a futuristic sciFi scenario its possible to imagine running electronic simulations that are designed to be functionally equivalent to the ones Thomas was running. The electronic results would have the same difficulty of reaching a certain conclusion. The difference is that we have a definite advantage being able to get inside and read Thomas' mind rather than having to trust him.

It would of course be presumptuous to assume that science had proved that such a scenario is possible. What is definitely clear is that its not reasonable to assume it could happen any time soon (counted in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years).

-Astaire

astaire1 wrote:

However, I was not able to argue the point that brain structure does not contain all the necessary information to produce and comprehend sentences, since this can be easily accomplished in an isolation chamber. I don't see how your point of non-convergence helps (perhaps we need a better definition of that).

Dunamis: and it is a thing that gets placed somewhere, moved around, and then placed somewhere else
Astaire: sure that's the usefulness of the metaphor. It sounds like you are describing standard information theory. Engineers would be lost without it.

Dunamis: True is of sentences, not of "bits of data" or of "scans of brain".
Astaire: Yes, you and DeathMonkey seem to agree on that and I may have a tendency to forget it. However, as I described yesterday, the brain scans themselves are not "true" but interpretations of those scans can indeed be true or false. All concepts and interpretations necessarily connect to the world through descriptions (language).

Dunamis: The sharing of a criteria though is not a sharing of a brain state. There is no one-to-one relationship between these kinds of events.
Astaire. I disagree with the 1st statement and agree with the 2nd. The sharing of brain state would quite likely have some holistic aspects that tend to be ignored when comparing the brain to a computer. But brain states can indeed be shared via language and presumably via various electronic brain linking methods.

Dunamis: Brain states (not to mention states of the nervous system, hormone system, etc. for the brain is not a command and control center in the way that the 19th century believed, a captain of a ship),
Astaire: Agreed.

Dunamis (before): Because the sentences which express my beliefs are not found in the brain.
Astaire (before): With proper decoding, the sentences [concepts that could be usefully mapped to parts of the sentence] could be found in the brain at the moment of speaking them.

Dunamis: I have no problem with the near-science fiction idea, for instance, that all (or a great deal of) the "information" (relationships) in a brain could be downloaded onto a quantum-supercomputer. And that the results could produce behavior very much like the person it was downloaded from. But stil, even in this fantasy, the beliefs ascribable to explain the meaning of that computer's words/actions, would not be reducible to a one-to-one correspondence between "belief x" and "chip state y". Such a computer, nor its reported states, would be the final word on what he/she/it believed.

Astaire: Very good last sentence ! ! It is well taken and appreciated. I do see this as a danger of the metaphor. Indeed I agree that the computer nor any human has the final word. The most useful beliefs for an organism are not always the most truthful beliefs.

It would be lost because looking at brain scans, that is actually looking at them, will not render "reasons", or veritably, not the same reasons, that linguistic discourse will.

There is looking at the brain, in the context of the world, and there is having a conversation with someone, and using linguistic references to criteria with which to engage and interact with the speaker. The two processes of interaction are different. Just as looking at someone's face, and having a conversation with them while doing so, or not doing so, are different.

It just would not answer the questions "why" in the same way. This is a difference in process and result. "She's too much like a commie." is quite different than "lobe x affiliated with trauma is firing up". No brain map would give us the sentence "She's too much like a commie", especially as distinct from the sentence "She's too liberal".

Because such a description is incomplete to an understanding of what meaning is.

Because the sentences which express my beliefs are not found in the brain. And the distinguished form that sentences take make up the 'information" which gives us meaning, in the social milieu of criteria sharing.

And these thousands of years have been fundamentally Cartesian and before that Platonic in their soul/body dualism. This is the fundamental thought beneath your descriptions. You do not realize this, it seems.

Not at all. Because beliefs are non-convergent.

The judgment, which is entirely a Cartesian fantasy, that you assume here, is non-existent. One does not look at memories like looking at home movie.

I think the scale and scope of information you would need to answer one of Dunamis' challenges is more than could be contained in a human brain, and that makes it 'incredible'. If you watched the video link I posted, they were able to 'read' from the brain and then 'translate' the motor information of a monkey's arm and simulate it in real time, but this was done by a computer. I can see that 'in principle' and perhaps in time in practice, it might be possible to do the same thing for human vocalisations (which would be great for Hawking). But to get anywhere near a full simulation with predictive power would take a full schematic 'map' of the brain and the live imputs from all the senses. And I think that is what you would need to get from my brain, through all the stops and starts and intermittent daydreams and distractions, to the content of this post, which is my semi-considered thought.

I think that the brain is at least as much a chaotic system as lightening, and if you cannot do better than the Thor theory at predicting, you cannot really claim that your explanation is more fundamental.

You seem to be saying that thoughts are processes of some kind in brains, governed by quantum mechanics and electo-chemistry - which may be true, I don't think we know for sure. But even if it is so, the complexity of the processes is such that only a hypothesised future computer more complex than the human brain will ever be capable of 'understanding' them.

This means that for mere human philosophers like ourselves, there is indeed no possibility of understanding them in this way, and therefore an 'intentional stance' (if I understood that right) is not (for us) mappable onto a physical explanation, although we may, (in the terms of that intensional model) 'believe that it would in principle be'.