The experience excuse

Bluedoc · March 9, 2025, 1:53am

Sheldon · March 9, 2025, 6:34am

That’s not what’s happening, you’re just incapable of objectivity as you are closed minded, thus nuanced thinking is beyond you. This is why you keep producing facile false dichotomies like this one.

Whether hate is good or bad is relative, to say it’s always bad is facile reasoning. I even gave you examples of hate that might not be considered bad, and all you did was ignore them, and repeat your facile original claim.

Hatred can be good, or bad, and good and bad can be both relative and subjective.

Your inability to reason beyond facile absolutes, or to keep an open mind, is not the fault of anyone here, but paticipation here is not mandatory.

Another facile sweeping claim, religion has been in steady and continuous decline in the UK since the second world war.

Your weak and poorly reasoned irrational arguments did most of the heavy lifting.

Your posts have been relentlessly dishonest from the start, so this is simple projection from you.

Everytime you’ve falsely accused me of irrationality, I have asked you to explain which principle of logic I’ve violated, where I did this, and why? Not once have even tried to justify your lie.

A hasty generalisation fallacy. See I’ve just quoted and explained why your claim is irrational, citing the logical fallacy you’ve used.

No it’s not serious, the real zealots, the blinkered closed minded sententious apologists, usually can’t handle having their claims and beliefs subjected to critical scrutiny, so they flounce out in a sulk in the end. Much as you’re doing here I suspect.

Well, you may worry about imaginary unevidenced things, but I don’t.

Aha, i nailed it, it’s a flounce.

One of them’s about to leave anyway.

Kevin_Levites · March 9, 2025, 3:04pm

I disagree with you, as religion often makes someone into a worse person . . . not a better person.

The violence and homophobia is an example. Religion is used as an excuse to justify domestic violence, capital punishment, and restricting the teaching of many science topics (like evolution) in school.

Discarding religion would seem to make someone a better person . . . not embracing it.

nonselcei · March 9, 2025, 11:39pm

Are you saying the Q.M. creates a reality of god for theists, and a reality of no-God for atheists? Depending upon the reality of the person?

nonselcei · March 9, 2025, 11:42pm

Non all religions promote these things. For example Jainism has NON-violence at the start, middle and end. Many schools of Hinduism also non violent. ALthough certain branches many not. I am not sure about homophobia.

nonselcei · March 9, 2025, 11:59pm

WHAT the heck is 'qualia"? is this just a new word for ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’?

Nyarlathotep · March 10, 2025, 12:01am

You are spot on, except it isn’t new.

nonselcei · March 10, 2025, 12:09am

I think you are on to something. For example Mormon missionaries ask seekers to pray to know the truth. The expectation is that one will have some ‘experience’ which will prove Mormonism to be true. It could be as simple as information related to Mormonism arriving to them, and they get some spiritual confirmation.

The experience may also be as impressive as actually seeing God and or angels. For example Joseph Smith claimed the experience of having a conversation with god.

Fundementalist Christians might have some spiritual experience during a sermon, or some other event. I don’t think they rule that out. But the current effort is to frame scientific findings in a creationist viewpoint. The idea they promote is there is enough evidence to prove god, if one wants to believe. Otherwise, no amount of evidence is available for a skeptic.

In either case, yes money is often extracted by believers. The LDS church has billions of dollars, and yet still requires at minium 10 percent contribution, but also promotes giving additional offerings. As I understand it, the Church as an organization could still function on reserves and investments indefinitely without any new contributions.

Kevin_Levites · March 10, 2025, 1:31am

I can’t disagree with these points, and I should have been clearer in my post.

I know that there are “enlightened” and egalitarian religions, and it is both unfair and bigoted to lump them all together indiscriminately. Even in Christianity, we have the Quakers who are very much into nonviolence. The (almost extinct) Shakers were very proactive about putting women in positions of real authority within the organization.

Even so, I feel that groups like the Jains, Quakers, Shakers, and peaceful Buddhist sects are a very small minority.

Yet I still should have acknowledged the exceptions in my original post, as I get irritated when theists make sweeping assumptions about all atheists . . . and I shouldn’t be hippocritical.

nonselcei · March 10, 2025, 3:26am

I get it, there are religions that are violent, and fanatical.

Sheldon · March 10, 2025, 7:42am

It’s a fancy word for our subjective experience. As far as I can see it adds nothing and explains nothing.

Of coure people of a religious bent, inject this with all manner of woo-woo as well. Our recently flounced xtian apologist, also kep claiming it was somehow evidence for panpsychism, more woo-woo.

Everytime he used it, I replaced it with consciousness, which is what we were really discussing. They love their appeals to mystery.

Bluedoc · March 10, 2025, 7:05pm

Well @Sheldon, if I recall correctly it was made clear that you were just too closed minded and sophist to accept the qualia and pansychism possibilities.

What would that be - Argument From Everyone Else Is Parochial?

Sheldon · March 10, 2025, 7:16pm

Yes, he was pretty clear and consistent on that point.

Actually if someone argues that someone else is wrong because they’re biased, that is itself fallacious, biased does not necessarily mean one is wrong. Though of course he was projecting, he’s the one who has chosen to believe in one deity from countless thousands without any objective evidence, I try to treat all claims to the same standard.

mordant · March 11, 2025, 1:02pm

It’s an attempt to make subjective feelings and experiences have some thing-in-itself grounding in the material world rather than being emergent biological responses to stimuli. You can think of qualia as an imagined particle that conveys experience – what it is like to be or do a thing. It is the usual needless multiplication of entities by people with no real explanations.

Sheldon · March 11, 2025, 2:50pm

Ding ding ding ding, we have a winner!

Atheist: " we can’t explain X."

Theist “Yes we can god did it”

Atheist “How?”

Theists “God’s mysterious, so we can’t explain that.”

Atheist “Meh, you’ve just added an unevidenced claim, that has no explanatory powers?”

Theist “enjoy hell.”

Atheist

Calilasseia · March 12, 2025, 8:55am

Wrong. It’s the product of brain chemistry interacting with sensory data. Next?

Which is one of the go to pieces of assertionist wibble that every woo merchant flocks to.

Er, not so hard.

Neuroscience is not my specialist remit, but I’ll happily point you in the direction of those who do consider this their specialist remit. And point you in addition to the fact that neuroscientists have published research papers, documenting their use of fMRI scanning technology to read thoughts. The research is still in its infancy, but I’ve presented a couple of relevant papers here in the past. One that is apposite here is this one:

Visual Image Reconstruction From Human Brain Activity Using A Combination Of Multiscale Local Image Decoders by Yoichi Miyawaki, Hajime Uchida, Okito Yamashita, Masa-aki Sato, Yusuke Morito, Hiroki C. Tanabe, Norihiro Sadato & Yukiyasu Kamitani, Neuron, 60: 915-929 (11th December 2008) [Full paper downloadable from here]

Miyawaki et al:

SUMMARY

Perceptual experience consists of an enormous number of possible states. Previous fMRI studies have predicted a perceptual state by classifying brain activity into prespecified categories. Constraint-free visual image reconstruction is more challenging, as it is impractical to specify brain activity for all possible images. In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns. Binary contrast, 10 × 10-patch images (2¹⁰⁰ possible states) were accurately reconstructed without any image prior on a single trial or volume basis by measuring brain activity only for several hundred random images. Reconstruction was also used to identify the presented image among millions of candidates. The results suggest that our approach provides an effective means to read out complex perceptual states from brain activity while discovering information representation in multivoxel patterns.

Oh look, a research paper covering an experiment aimed at determining what image a human being has seen, and picking out the correct image seen from a large possible data set, by decoding read brain signals.

Let’s look at this in more detail, shall we?

Miwayaki et al:

INTRODUCTION

Objective assessment of perceptual experience in terms of brain activity represents a major challenge in neuroscience. Previous fMRI studies have shown that visual features, such as orientation and motion direction (Kamitani and Tong, 2005, 2006), and visual object categories (Cox and Savoy, 2003; Haxby et al., 2001) can be decoded from fMRI activity patterns by a statistical ‘‘decoder,’’ which learns the mapping between a brain activity pattern and a stimulus category from a training data set. Furthermore, a primitive form of ‘‘mind-reading’’ has been demonstrated by predicting a subjective state under the presentation of an ambiguous stimulus using a decoder trained with unambiguous stimuli (Kamitani and Tong 2005, 2006; Haynes and Rees, 2005). However, such a simple classification approach is insufficient to capture the complexity of perceptual experience, since our perception consists of numerous possible states, and it is impractical to measure brain activity for all the states. A recent study (Kay et al., 2008) has demonstrated that a presented image can be identified among a large number of candidate images using a receptive field model that predicts fMRI activity for visual images (see also Mitchell et al., 2008, for a related approach). But the image identification was still constrained by the candidate image set. Even more challenging is visual image reconstruction, which decodes visual perception into an image, free from the constraint of categories (see Stanley et al., 1999, for reconstruction using LGN spikes).

A possible approach is to utilize the retinotopy in the early visual cortex. The retinotopy associates the specific visual field location to the active cortical location, or voxel, providing a mapping from the visual field to the cortical voxels (Engel et al., 1994; Sereno et al., 1995). Thus, one may predict local contrast information by monitoring the fMRI signals corresponding to the retinotopy map of the target visual field location. The retinotopy can be further elaborated using a voxel receptive-field model. By inverting the receptive-field model, a presented image can be inferred given the brain activity consistent with the retinotopy (Thirion et al., 2006).

For those unfamiliar with the concept of retinotopy, this describes the fact that the spatial arrangement of neurons in the visual cortex is related to the spatial position of viewed objects in the visual field. Early work determining this was first undertaken by noting the correlation of spatially specific visual cortex lesions to specific areas of visual field loss, in, for example, cases of brain damage arising from battlefield injury. However, the above paper seeks to use this interesting fact as a means of determining the nature of a perceived image, by reading the activity within the retinotopic neurons, and correlating that activity to different areas of visual contrast. Indeed, there exists scientific literature noting that there is a correlation between retinotopy mapping and the nature of the folding of the visual cortex, but I digress.

Basically, what the scientists set out to do in this paper, was to determine if it was possible to use the differential activity arising in different parts of the neuronal retinotopy map, to elucidate the nature of an image seen by a human being, without prior knowledge on the part of the experimenters of the actual image perceived.

It’s also of note that even this early in the paper, the authors cite a number of prior papers covering work devoted to elucidating basic information about the thoughts present within the brains of human experimental subjects, using appropriate signal detection and processing means.

There is, of course, a complication in the use of this information, as the authors outline below, but, note, they also present a potential solution.

A little later on in the paper, the authors continue with:

Miwayaki et al:

Here, we present an approach to visual image reconstruction using multivoxel patterns of fMRI signals and multiscale visual representation (Figure 1A). We assume that an image is represented by a linear combination of local image elements of multiple scales (colored rectangles). The stimulus state at each local element (C_i, C_j, .) is predicted by a decoder using multivoxel patterns (weight set for each decoder, w_i, w_j, .), and then the outputs of all the local decoders are combined in a statistically optimal way (combination coefficient, l_i, l_j, .) to reconstruct the presented image. As each local element has fewer possible states than the entire image, the training of local decoders requires only a small number of training samples. Hence, each local decoder serves as a ‘‘module’’ for a simple image component, and the combination of the modular decoders allows us to represent numerous variations of complex images. The decoder uses all the voxels from the early visual areas as the input, while automatically pruning irrelevant voxels. Thus, the decoder is not explicitly informed about the retinotopy mapping.

So, basically, the technique that was used, consisted of reading signals from a range of retinotopy neurons, treating them as voxels in a state space, and determining a means of combining the signal data in such a manner, as to reproduce in a reliable and repeatable manner, the image perceived by the human subject.

I’ll let everyone here read the rest of the paper themselves, as it’s a fascinating read. But already, this should be telling the people who paid attention in class, that neuroscientists are progressing apace with respect to the matter of understanding how thoughts, and indeed conciousness, operate. for that matter, this experiment would be impossible if mythology fanboy wibbling about “consciousness” was something other than rectally extruded garbage.

But wait, there’s another paper in the same vein as the above. Here’s the non-technical account:

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind:

And here’s the actual scientific paper:

Reconstructing Visual Experiences From Brain Activity Evoked By Natural Movies by Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu, and Jack L. Gallant, current Biology, 21: 1641-1646 (11th October 2011) [Full paper downloadable from here.

Nishimoto et al:

Summary

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations [1, 2] and can form the basis for brain decoding devices [3–5]. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity [6–8]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow [9], so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.

Heh, not only are scientists reconstructing still images, they’re now reconstructing movies played in the brain. Yet according to your tiresomely parroted assertions, Andrew, this is supposed to be impossible, and an instance of “ignorance and denial”. The web page for the Gallant Laboratory, which conducted the research, is here, and as an aside, the scientists at that laboratory cite as prior art informing their work the Miwayaki et al paper from 2008 I presented above.

Let’s take a further look at this paper, shall we?

Nishimoto et al:

Results

Many of our visual experiences are dynamic: perception, visual imagery, dreaming, and hallucinations all change continuously over time, and these changes are often the most compelling and important aspects of these experiences. Obtaining a quantitative understanding of brain activity underlying these dynamic processes would advance our understanding of visual function. Quantitative models of dynamic mental events could also have important applications as tools for psychiatric diagnosis and as the foundation of brain machine interface devices [3–5].

Modeling dynamic brain activity is a difficult technical problem. The best tool available currently for noninvasive measurement of brain activity is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has relatively high spatial resolution [12, 13]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured using fMRI are relatively slow [9], especially when compared to the speed of natural vision and many other mental processes. It has therefore been assumed that fMRI data would not be useful for modeling brain activity evoked during natural vision or by other dynamic mental processes.

Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model separately describes the neural mechanisms mediating visual motion information and their coupling to much slower hemodynamic mechanisms. In this report, we first validate this encoding model by showing that it describes how spatial and temporal information are represented in voxels throughout visual cortex. We then use a Bayesian approach [8] to combine estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior, in order to produce reconstructions of natural movies from BOLD signals.

We recorded BOLD signals from three human subjects while they viewed a series of color natural movies (20° × 20° at 15 Hz). A fixation task was used to control eye position. Two separate data sets were obtained from each subject. The training data set consisted of BOLD signals evoked by 7,200 s of color natural movies, where each movie was presented just once. These data were used to fit a separate encoding model for each voxel located in posterior and ventral occipitotemporal visual cortex. The test data set consisted of BOLD signals evoked by 540 s of color natural movies, where each movie was repeated ten times. These data were used to assess the accuracy of the encoding model and as the targets for movie reconstruction. Because the movies used to train and test models were different, this approach provides a fair and objective evaluation of the accuracy of the encoding and decoding models [2, 14].

BOLD signals recorded from each voxel were fit separately using a two-stage process. Natural movie stimuli were first filtered by a bank of neurally inspired nonlinear units sensitive to local motion-energy [10, 11]. L1-regularized linear regression [15, 16] was then used to fit a separate hemodynamic coupling term to each nonlinear filter (Figure 1; see also Supplemental Experimental Procedures available online). The regularized regression approach used here was optimized to obtain good estimates even for computational models containing thousands of regressors. In this respect, our approach differs from the regression procedures used in many other fMRI studies [17, 18].

To determine how much motion information is available in BOLD signals, we compared prediction accuracy for three different encoding models (Figures 2A–2C): a conventional static model that includes no motion information [8, 19], a nondirectional motion model that represents local motion energy but not direction, and a directional model that represents both local motion energy and direction. Each of these models was fit separately to every voxel recorded in each subject, and the test data were used to assess prediction accuracy for each model. Prediction accuracy was defined as the correlation between predicted and observed BOLD signals. The averaged accuracy across subjects and voxels in early visual areas (V1, V2, V3, V3A, and V3B) was 0.24, 0.39, and 0.40 for the static, nondirectional, and directional encoding models, respectively (Figures 2D and 2E; see Figure S1A for subject- and area-wise comparisons). This difference in prediction accuracy was significant (p < 0.0001, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). An earlier study showed that the static model tested here recovered much more information from BOLD signals than had been obtained with any previous model [8, 19]. Nevertheless, both motion models developed here provide far more accurate predictions than are obtained with the static model. Note that the difference in prediction accuracy between the directional and nondirectional motion models, though significant, was small (Figure 2E; Figure S1A). This suggests that BOLD signals convey spatially localized but predominantly nondirectional motion information. These results show that the motion-energy encoding model predicts BOLD signals evoked by novel natural movies.

I’ll let those interested in real science devour the rest of the contents of that paper for themselves, as it makes truly compelling reading to those of us who find reality interesting.

Oh look, two examples of successful experiments that would be impossible to conduct, if mythology fanboy wibbling about “consciousness” was something other than rectally extruded bum custard.

Read the above and weep. Scientists are making a mockery of your childish view of the universe and its contents.

Calilasseia · March 12, 2025, 9:10am

What is actually pathetic, is treating unsupported assertions uncritically as fact. Which is exactly what you’re doing.

Oh wait, we have ZERO evidence for your cartoon lava Auschwitz and its horned Kommandant.

No, the people with serious problems are the people who prefer mythological nonsense to reality. Though since you’re clearly one of those people, it’s no surprise to see you fail to understand this.

I just provided an example with my exposition on neuroscience experiments.

And it’s mythology fanboy projection time again!

We’ve seen enough lies, deception and manipulation from your ilk here, to last us several lifetimes. I cite as evidence: just about every post here by creationists.

No. What made people turn to mythology after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the usual “a vacuum needs to be filled”. And religion duly offered its snake oil to the gullible, as it always does.

Oh, by the way, you might want to read this peer reviewed academic paper, which once again destroys you childish and simplistic view of the world, viz:

[19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, proevolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data – a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

[20] The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developed democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious,less wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions? There is evidence that within the U.S., strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast, where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses.

Oops. Looks like REALITY is subjecting your assertions to a Godzilla stomp.

No, what happened is that data refuting your assertions was presented. See above for another example.

You and your ilk make this so easy.

Get_off_my_lawn · March 12, 2025, 7:16pm

It’s just as if consciousness was an emergent property of a sufficiently big, sufficiently advanced, and properly adapted lump of neurons.

nonselcei · March 13, 2025, 1:20am

Well, how many brain cells are required for a thought? There was this person that cultured brain cells, and they did display activity that brain cells usually have. The person thought the little clumps of brain were not capable of ‘thinking’, especially without any sensory input. But how does anyone really know?

Sheldon · March 13, 2025, 9:16am

“the adult male human brain, at an average of 1.5 kg, has 86 billion neurons and 85 billion non-neuronal cells – numbers that deviate from the expected by 7 and 24% only.”

Best to start with the facts…