It is for regular mechanics as well: “hypotheses non fingo”.
Feelings are not physical. I can’t feel your feelings. I can’t see your feelings. I can’t smell or hear them. The only way I know you have them is by your reactions.
We may know how they function, but that’s psychology, not physics
They are an emergent property arising from the physical.
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The point has already been raised that WHY and HOW are different classes of questions, and that often, asking WHY assumes that there even IS a why.
On another forum, someone’s child received a very concerning and possibly fatal diagnosis (thankfully, medical science ultimately came through and the child ended up living to adulthood and in full health).
At the time though this mother explained that she was fretting about WHY this was happening to her child. What was most helpful and comforting to her was not those who said they would “pray for her” or who assured her that god was “in control”. It was a wise nurse who put her hand on the mother’s shoulder and released her from her angst with this simple pronouncement: “There is no WHY. It is just biology. It happens sometimes.”
This has always stuck with me. We think that life is personal and directed, such that when it goes our way, the gods smile upon us, and when it doesn’t, they frown upon us or we stand outside their protection. When in fact, life really is just a series of events, some of which you like, some not so much. It’s really that simple – and that hard, and free of guarantees. Yes there is cause and effect, some of which we understand, and we can influence the odds in our favor by, e.g., eating healthy foods, getting exercise, or other best practices. But we don’t control those stray cosmic rays or biological malfunctions or infections in some total and absolutely reliable way.
Ultimately the need for there to be a spiritual or supernatural dimension to things reflects, not reality, but the desire to be able to stack the deck in our favor by placating a deity or being in proper harmony with nature or whatever, and to thus be insulated from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.
That’d be great if it actually could be demonstrated to work for any person or group in a way that’s reproducible by copying their beliefs or practices. And in a way distinguishable from random happenstance.
Since I gave that a fair go for the first 35 or so years of my life, I have found it more productive to understand that every human advancement or innovation has come from science, not religion or mysticism, and therefore whatever future advancements or innovations are apt to come from science as well, all things being equal.
This is not “scientism” or the worship of science, as some theists like to gaslight. It is just observing what actually works and what is just claimed to work. Science isn’t all-knowing, and in some aspects not all that advanced other than relative to many generations ago, and sometimes gets things wrong (in which case it eventually self-corrects, when its methods are actually respected and applied). And science in general is not emotionally satisfying whereas mystical / spiritual beliefs can feel satisfying or even “truthy” and can inspire false confidence more readily than we can extract certitude from nature, which is not entirely within either our understanding or control.
Some personalities crave a feeling of certitude or control even if it has no basis and one is simply trying to will it into existence through a preponderance of emotional sensations. I confess that for those types of people, this can help them make sense of things or take some sense of comfort in the face of difficulty even when the abstraction leaks a lot. Personally, I could never tolerate that much leakage, and have found that in the long run, bare-metal reality is far more useful in making sense of why things are as they are, INCLUDING those many, many situations where WHY is not even the right class of question. YMMV.
Hopefully we are meaning the same thing. The manifestation of a feeling is physical, but the feeling itself isn’t. If I feel sad, you can’t tell unless I cry or something. If I show no emotion, I still have the emotion, but you can’t tell.
I think you can. fMRI studies show increased blood flow to specific areas of the brain associated with particular feelings when stimulated with that feeling. You may hide it on your face but you cannot hide it in your brain.
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I kind of see your point, but what the fMRI is picking up is the manifestation of the feeling. Perhaps our definitions of what a “feeling” is are different and that’s where this disagreement is coming from.
But the important point is if our definitions are different, what difference does it make if our feelings are physical or not.
There are all kinds of physical things that I cant see smell or hear. Radio waves for example, still very much physical, just like thoughts and feelings. They are physical functions of the brain.
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Feelings are electrochemical processes in the brain. No brain processes ⇒ no feelings. And the other way around: you have feelings ⇒ there are brain processes. Thus, fMRI are picking up the physical aspect of the feelings. But what actual thoughts and impressions the brain interprets internally is of course not actually measurable, but requires the brain to use the transducers it controls (voice system, muscular system to type/write) to express and transmit.
What alternative(s) is/are there to feelings being biochemical/-electric processes?
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This seems to be the crux of things. There’s zero evidence that the particular configuration of matter and energy that make me, ME, can exist once that configuration collapses – and there’s lots of evidence that it can’t exist. And …
… that we can’t at present read thoughts, impressions and emotions doesn’t change that.
Or can’t we? There’s the fMRI scanning mentioned above, but also, there has been recent progress on decoding actual thoughts, controlling devices with thought, and so forth. There’s every reason to believe that in the end, all this mystery about how thoughts, emotions, qualia etc are represented in the brain will be dispelled.
But of course until then, we don’t need to guess because it’s somehow intolerable not to know. This is why I posted the “I don’t know … therefore God” meme earlier. Seeking a deus ex machina isn’t helpful. It doesn’t even have descriptive power. It is sheer speculation, and in most cases, motivated “reasoning”.
We don’t all seem to think the same way. What if everyone is a unique piece of hardware, with its own operating system/instruction set as an analogy (where everyone is incompatible with everyone else)?
I doubt it goes that far. We prioritize different things, care about different things, put basic concepts together differently. But the concepts themselves seem to have very similar representations. Enough so that, e.g., different disabled people can control devices with thought and recent experiments have decoded in general terms what various people are envisioning. “Thinking about a cat” seems like a step on the road to “thinking about my cat Sylvester that died last year and how much I miss him every day”. Maybe there are some hard limits to such things though, IDK. We’ll see.
As I understand it: those systems have to be tuned to the specific user, like every day. And there is neural plasticity (the brain changing to work better with the reader, basically it takes practice).
I do have to be pedantic here since technology has recently advanced to the point where it can read the words people are thinking of directly from their brain, its a rather fascinating area of research.
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Yes, there was a “yet” missing there. It should have been
However, it might not ever be possible to measure your feelings or thoughts as you/your brain perceive them, as those seem to be highly subjective, as if by definition. To measure the presence of thoughts T and U from the outside (or even with probes inside) brain A, is not necessarily the same as figuring out how they are perceived by brain A. And the presence of the same thoughts T and U does not necessarily have to be perceived the same by another brain B. Yes, brains A and B are wired similarly in the macroscopic sense and can think the same thoughts macroscopically, but the details vary, as they don’t have exactly the same synapses and the exact same microstates.
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Here are two papers destroying the myth that consciousness doesn’t have a material basis:
[1] [i]Visual Image Reconstruction From Human Brain Activity Using A Combination Of Multiscale Local Image Decoders[i] by Yoichi Miyawaki, Hajime Uchida, Okito Yamashita, Masa-aki Sato, Yusuke Morito, Hiroki C. Tanabe, Norihiro Sadato and Yukiyasu Kamitani, Neuron, 60: 915-929 (11th December 2008)
https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(08)00958-6
[2] 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)
If assertions about consciousness being “immaterial” were something other than vacuous noise, the above experiments would have been impossible.
Quite simply, scientists have demonstrated, with the above experiments, that it is possible to determine which still images or movies people have viewed, via examination of blood oxygen density in relevant parts of the brain - in other words, from a MATERIAL source of data.
Consciousness is nothing more than a particular form of data processing, underpinned by brain chemistry. The above experiments constitute robust evidence for this postulate.
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A couple of things leapt out there, so I can’t speak for others but my atheism has nothing do with this question, and vice versa. I don’t believe any deity or deities exist for the same reason I disbelieve any claim, insufficient evidence has been offered to allay my doubts.
Now for materialism, I cannot claim only the material world exists, but I can assert (again) that I don’t believe claims that more than the material physical world exists, as again insufficient evidence has been offered to allay my doubts.
These are two separate and distinct claim that I disbelieve, 1) that a deity exists, and 2) that something exists beyond the material physical world.
Consciousness (human) is never observed without a functioning human brain, it is impaired when that physical brain is damaged, and disappears in every single case when that brain dies. There is no evidence consciousness can exist without a functioning human brain, or survive after it dies.
The hard question of consciousness is simply an as yet unanswered question, that some people want to pretend is evidence for subjective beliefs they hold, but cannot evidence, and some apologists use this question to make fallacious appeals to mystery.
Outside of the wavelength of red light, we don’t know that what we subjectively observe is the same experience.
I imagine there is a great deal we don’t know, and might never know, this does not justify (for me) investing credulity in appeals to ignorance and mystery. asking the question is fine, but asserting something based on the lack of alternative is fallacious.
So again I can’t speak for others but I don’t assume this, I also don’t believe claims consciousness is devolved from the physical brain, unless you can objectively evidence that emboldened part sufficiently of course?
A question is not evidence, and once again it is definitely illogical to assert something is true or is the case because we lack an alternative explanation. However there is plenty of objective evidence (see above) that human consciousness is an emergent property of the human brain, even if this doesn’t explain exactly how this happens. Conversely there is no objective evidence that human consciousness exists independently of any human brain.
No I don’t think so, opinions change of course, and if we’re smart we change them based on the evidence, not on the lack of it for an alternative to an idea we are biased towards.
NB Everything science currently understands was once a gap or a hard question, as others have pointed out, why would we assume a priori that there is no natural answer to this gap or question, what knowledge or evidence supports that assumption?
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Based on the evidence by evolving a problem solving brain.
It is an explanation, and a well supported one of course, every single time someone dies their consciousness disappears, and we never see human consciousness without a functioning human brain, it is just an incomplete explanation.
I have no problem with our understanding of consciousness being incomplete, as long as no one tries assert an unevidenced belief based on that gap in our knowledge.
That question seems assume it is necessary, how do we know this is not just one “solution” that worked out of countless random mutations in countless species over billions of years, human consciousness likely evolved because it gave us a survival advantage, a brain that can problem solve would be a huge advantage in living long enough to reproduce after all. So it needn’t be necessary, it need only work to help those with it pass on their DNA.
Well this seems to apply that all living things are conscious in the way humans are, and we know of only one planet in the entire universe currently where conscious living things exist. Life could emerge here so it did, it can’t elsewhere so it has not. Natural selection could easily explain why a problem solving brain exists, and how do we know consciousness isn’t simply an advantageous component of that problem solving brain?
Not sure that “we don’t currently know” equates to giving up. Science is in its infancy after all, compared to subjective religions for example.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but that is not how I would word it. It’s an objective fact that physical brain exists, and that we only ever see human consciousness in conjunction with a functioning human brain, when that brain dies or is impaired the consciousness either disappears or is likewise impaired. I have seen no objective evidence that brain function is due to non-physical or (super)natural processes, nor is there any evidence that human consciousness can exist without, or survive the death of, the human brain.
So while yours is absolute claim, mine is more cautious, and cites the evidence we have, and what we do not have evidence for, so:
- I believe that brain function is a natural physical phenomenon.
- That consciousness is likely an emergent property of the human brain, as the evidence supports these (1 & 2)
- I don’t believe human consciousness can exist without, or survive the death of, the human brain. As I have seen no objective evidence to support this.
NB Point 3 is statement of doubt, and disbelief, it is not a claim something is untrue as your assertion was.
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We do somewhat live a delusional existence.
We feel that we are absolutely free to make decisions, take actions and do things through the sheer power of our mind. We think something and then it happens.
For example, I think that I want to move my pinky finger and low and behold, my finger wiggles. Not quite as exciting as parting the Red Sea, but pretty miraculous?! Wow, I can control fingers! Alrighty then. So I think about moving someone else’s finger, and low and behold, nothing happens, their finger doesn’t do what I’m thinking. For some reason I have control over my finger but not theirs.
My body has nerves and muscles and my brain sends signal across to my muscles and can make them relax and contract, and so my brain can control my finger because it is connected to it. So then what is my mind, my consciousness doing? Is it controlling electrons, and chemical reactions within my brain? Am I able to think about moving an election rather than a whole finger? What if I think about the electrons in a light bulb, can I move them and get the bulb to light up? Nope, doesn’t seem to be the case.
So is my mind controlling electrons and/or chemical reactions, OR, are these things happening anyway in my brain? Are scientists correct in saying there are only 4 fundamental forces in the entire universe? electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravity. But where is the mind force or the consciousness force if you like?
If we knew all the forces in play, we could accurately predict the next event, we would know if a signal is going to go from my brain to my finger. So, am I simply a conscious observer, fooling myself into thinking, well my little finger moved because I choose to move it. It was me, not just undirected four fundamental forces doing what they must.
But we live our lives on an entirely different level, we fool ourselves into thinking we are making choices, because we are free to do so. We must live like that, otherwise our lives would feel meaningless.