A difficult puzzle..

I should probably take more time to get deep with this, but I will simply ask concise questions.

1. For those of you who think that thoughts, feelings etc. are actually the results of spirits/souls within people, how do you explain the fact that neurology, based on ample evidence, is responsible for peoples' thoughts, feelings, personality, etc.? Damage to certain parts of the brain will undoubtedly (after a certain age when neurological plasticity is less effective) cause effects to certain traits of the mind, emotions, motor skills, etc., and these effects can be predicted based on what exact parts of the brain were damaged. Also, chemicals being released at higher or lower-than-usual rates in a brain, will result in certain characteristic effects; for example ecstasy will result in unusually rapid release of serotonin, which will result in characteristic effects such as unusual friendliness and perhaps sexual appetite.

2. For those of you who think that thoughts, feelings, etc. are entirely the result of physical interactions in the brain (and perhaps, indirectly from the body), consider these two assumptions..

A. It's true that all physical interactions must result entirely in physical results, correct? And,

B. It's true that feelings of emotions, pain, etc. are not physical, correct?

If both of those assumptions (A and B) are true, then we can certainly say that something nonphysical is occurring in the human mind and feelings.



How do we resolve both 1. and 2.? 1. Seems to imply that thoughts and feelings etc. are the result of purely physical phenomena. 2. Seems to imply that there must be something nonphysical which is partly responsible for thoughts, feelings etc.

How do we resolve this question? Are thoughts, feelings, and consciousness purely the result of physical processes, or are they partly due to something nonphysical?

Something supernatural?

I personally am undecided.

 

There is one last option: which is that assumption A. from the OP is not true. That physical processes can result in nonphysical results. For example, physical processes in the brain resulting in nonphysical effects such as feelings of emotions and pain.

But how is this conceivable?

 

I'd say the other way around. There is nothing unphysical about feelings and the like. Depends of course, on how you see it.

It's a bit like stones in a circle, if the stones are in a circle, the circle exists. If the stones are arranged in some other way, the circle goes away. To some extent, the circle was there, I mean, the stones were forming a circle, but on the other hand, there was no more stuff there, no object. You need to specify what you mean by physical.

Emotions can be understood as patterns and processes in our brains, and so, they are physical. They are not necessarily matter on their own, though.

 

You mean, synergy. But the kind of synergy you talk about here is nothing like the type of synergy that occurs with physical interactions in the brain producing emotions etc. (assuming that these are entirely physical interactions).

Anything physical must be matter or energy. Emotions, pain etc. are not matter, and they are certainly not physical energy. So how can they be physical? That is the puzzle.

 

The brain releases chemicals to make feelings, the feelings are physical and can be observed with brain scans.

 

Emotions are matter (the chemical compounds released) and they are energy (electrical discharge).

There is not anything supernatural about the processes in the brain.

 

Emotions themselves do not appear to be physical, even if they coincide with and thus appear to be caused by certain physical interactions. That is a subtle difference.

 

They are the product of chemicals and electricity. They are physical, and absolutely nothing supernatural.

 

You have zero way to prove this, even if there is evidence for it. However, even if you accept the assumption you make here as being true, that definitely does not prove the following conclusion:

If A is caused by B, that does NOT equate to A being B.

 

I would suggest reading Scientific American, there is far more evidence to support my position than yours. Mine is based on scientific observations, not invoking the supernatural to explain a phenomenon.

 

Emotions (in this context at least) are conceptual. They don't really exist in their own right but only as a reaction to a the "physical" brain activity.

Try thinking of an elephant. Get the image of the elephant "in your mind". The elephant now exists, in that it has features you can describe and can influence you (it might amuse you or scare you for example). The elephant doesn't physically exist but that doesn't make it supernatural either.

The human brain is amazing, confusing and not entirely understood but that is no excuse to start talking about the supernatural.

 

I agree that there is no "positive" evidence for anything supernatural, but emotions and feelings and pain etc. are not physical phenomena in and of themselves, because they aren't matter obviously, and they aren't energy. Anything physical is matter and/or energy.

EM radiation is pure energy, and any matter is potential energy, the amount of energy for which is determined simply by E=MC^2 (proportional to the amount of mass in said matter).

Emotions, for example, are not matter and don't have mass. The only known physical things which don't have mass, are EM radiation and possibly the gluon particle. But emotions are not EM radiation nor gluon particles; they are not physical!

 

I'm not supporting the supernatural, although..

The elephant doesn't physically exist, but we're obviously not talking about the physical elephant being supernatural. That would be a self-contradiction.

What I mean, is that emotions and feelings themselves, are not physical reactions.

 

You brought the word in to the thread though. There is no rational justification for it to be involved in this topic.

Emotions and feelings aren't physical themselves (as I said, they're conceptual) but they are a direct consequence of physical reactions - chemical and electrical processes in the mind and body. There is no mystery here.

 

Imagination and conceptualizing the future possibilities and circumstances are not at all emotional reactions to anything.

 

Emotions are chemical and electrical discharges. Matter and energy. Restrained to our physical world and by our physical laws. Neurons activate, those activations in sequence give us emotions, there is nothing supernatural about the process.

 

However they are electrical and chemical disbursements in the brain.

 

Prove it.


................

 

:/

I am not going to take a great deal of time proving the obvious.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/09/01/matching-brain-activity-to-words-and-thoughts/29100.html
http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00072/abstract
http://www.frontiersin.org/neuroscience

Neuroscience would be a great subject to read up on.

 

Adressing ony the part that pertains to me:

Assumption B is not true.

Feelings of emotion, pain et cetera are all ordinary physical phenomenon and they actually exist as electro-phisio-chemical events in the neural system. We can directly see them and measure them with tools such as PET scans. They actually exist.

The problem is that the first hand experience of them and the third hand experience are so completely different. You can place me under a PET scanner and directly see third hand the activity in my brain and neural system that I experience first hand as "love," but you will still see only the patterns and not experience the feeling. They are the same event, but seen from two different perspectives.

Recently, scientists have been able to measure brain activity and use computers to provide crude images of what the the "idea" is visualizing. While the technology is embryonic at best, it shows that the patterns of neural activity actually are the sensory experience.

Mind is what brain does. And all of it is physical.

 

How do you define physical? On what do you base your statement that emotions cannot be understood as patterns? We don't know how the mind works, who are you to say that it cannot read patterns as emotions? And even so, we know that patterns and shapes can alter the mind, which leads us to believe that things we perceive as emotions are indeed patterns.

Arrangements can be physical too. They include information. There is nothing superphysical about the information on a computer hard drive, but it is all about arrangement, no matter and no energy.

 

They're not physical, but they're also not conceptual. They actually exist. Emotions and sensations of pain etc. actually exist outside the realm of merely being a concept. If I conceptualize a robot that can do anything a human can do, that robot does not exist; only the concept does. I can conceptualize the concept of emotions, but the difference is, emotions actually do exist, and thus are not merely concepts, but real, actual phenomena, that do not appear to be physical.

They are (as supported by most rational evidence) caused by physical processes. That does not imply that they are physical in nature.

It doesn't, at least based on common sense, make sense that the feeling of joy, is intrinsically physical, even if it is apparently caused by physical phenomena.

You are confusing the difference between something being intrinsically physical, and merely caused by things which are physical.

Lastly, I'm no supernaturalist, so please don't get me wrong

 

What if physical phenomena are gateways to non-physical phenomena, somehow, and that this neuronal activity merely serves as gateways for supernatural activity to be experienced in this physical universe? E.g. when neurons fire in certain ways, that opens "gates" for supernatural phenomena to come into this physical universe and result in the realization of emotions etc.?

Again I'm very skeptical of that position since Occam's Razor seems to oppose a supernaturalist position, but it's undeniably a possibility.

 

Nor does it imply that they aren't physical in nature.

We have no reason to believe that our minds are not physical. We don't see them as physical because we never experience it's physical nature, just the processes that we interpret as feelings.

The conclusion that what goes on in our minds is not physical is not unreasonable for a layman, they seem disconnected. However, that conclusion cannot be held true scientifically just because people who don't know what they're doing fail to see connections.

 

Very true. But if they are physical in nature, then the standard laws of physics aren't enough to explain everything. The laws of even quantum field theory and the standard model of particle physics etc., cannot, by themselves, predict feelings.

If there were a robot which understood the laws of physics as currently known (which is essentially classical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum field theories and the standard model of particle physics etc.), they would never predict nor come close to understanding, pain, love, etc.

This means that the current known laws of physics must be insufficient, otherwise they'd predict feelings. Feelings do obviously exist, but cannot be predicted by the currently known laws of physics.

So I repeat, that if feelings etc. are indeed physical, they are beyond the current accepted laws of physics.