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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