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Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/12/2013 20:41:27The above can be summarized just as follows :Confirmation bias ...= goes also perfectly for materialists ,and for those experiments you mentioned mainly ...Way to go, scientist .Objectivity in science is a myth , Mr.Confirmation bias is certainly a potential risk where results are borderline - which is why the scientific method has been constantly enhanced to try and eliminate it. These experiments were peer-reviewed and replicated by many different researches around the world, all aware of the dangers of confirmation bias and other errors (as indicated in the links I posted, the experimental designs have been tightened since the original work, and more recent technology, e.g. fMRI, has put it beyond all reasonable doubt). The results are not borderline or ambiguous, they are clear, consistent, and unambiguous.To claim confirmation bias, you'll need to demonstrate where it could occur in all these unequivocal results. As it is, it looks like you're still clutching at straws to dismiss results that contradict your beliefs. That is the hallmark of crackpottery or delusion.I think it was Will Rogers who said, 'When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging'.
The above can be summarized just as follows :Confirmation bias ...= goes also perfectly for materialists ,and for those experiments you mentioned mainly ...Way to go, scientist .Objectivity in science is a myth , Mr.
Folks :It never fails to amaze me how the people sharing the same thoughts via their similar underlying a-priori held beliefs , are inclined to agree with each other ,no matter what , while rejecting the views of other people who happen not to agree with them : that's a form of confirmation bias .If you wanna avoid the latter , you will have to be open to all views out there on the subject , not just stick to your own that seem to be confirmed by people who do think like you do .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/12/2013 17:53:37Did you at least try to read my relevant posted excerpts on the subject ? Guess not .I have read the excerpts you posted. I was waiting for you to show what aspects of consciousness quantum mechanics explains, but so far you haven’t, other than to suggest that they are somehow linked. It appears you are trying to insert the immaterial and possibly God into physical reality and consciousness using quantum mechanics as a bridge. Regardless of what questions quantum mechanics might raise about deterministic mechanisms, it doesn’t explain anything specific about consciousness, or offer any possible answer to the questions you have repeatedly ignored or treated dismissively in the last 48 pages, including dlorde's most recent one concerning brain activity occurring before conscious awareness. The only way your interpretation or refutation of that experiment makes any sense is if you are implying that consciousness exerts a backwards causal effect or, as dlorde suggested, you conclude that immaterial consciousness acts before you are conscious of it , which suggests “two consciousnesses” – one that acts before one is aware of it, and without ones consent. You are not able to explain the flaw in the design of the experiment other than to claim it must be flawed because of who designed it. The other questions your theory can’t explain, and actually contradicts, even with quantum mechanics appended to it, include the following:If consciousness is immaterial, why is conscious experience not invulnerable to brain damage, disease, genetic defects, mind altering drugs or intoxicants, aging, etc. If the brain is just the instrument that receives sensory information from the world and executes action, why would damage or altering brain structures or biochemistry change the subjective experience of consciousness? Your answer has been that like a broken radio, the brain is not receiving consciousness properly, but I’ve pointed out several reasons why this explanation doesn’t work with the following examples:There are two kinds of impairment that result in patients not being able to see objects in half of their visual field. One is caused by a lesion in the optic nerve. The other is caused by a lesion in a part of the brain called the visual associative cortex, that materialists say processes visual information and produces the visual experience. Although both patients cannot see objects in part of their optical field, the patient with optic nerve damage is conscious of it - he will complain "Hey, doc, I can't see anything on my left side! What's up with that?" The patient with a lesion in the visual associative cortex does not ask this question. He doesn't know he cannot see an object in that part of the visual field, and he doesn't experience a blind spot there. The patient's brain no longer has an area responsible for processing what is going on in that area of the visual field - it ceases to exist consciously. The patient does not complain, because the part of the brain that might notice or complain is incapacitated, and no other part takes over. So what? you say. In your interpretation, in either case, it's "like" a broken TV set. The real "you" or the non- local consciousness is out there in outer space somewhere, unaffected. But the implications of this are absurd –is the real immaterial consciousness aware of the lesion in the associative visual cortex? Is it disrupting the non-local immaterial consciousness in any way? Is the immaterial consciousness frustrated or annoyed by the lack of information in his visual field? It's odd that the immaterial, unaffected consciousness can't communicate any of this back to the receiver in anyway. From the point of view of your brain or body, and your own conscious experience, the non local immaterial consciousness might as well not even exist because it isn’t accessible without specific kinds of brain activity. Here are more examples that can be explained by neuroscience but not by non-local immaterial consciousness: A lesion in the lateral frontal lobes produces deficits in sequencing. The patient is unable to plan or multitask. Orbital frontal lesions result in a loss of the ability to judge right and wrong. A lesion in the left temporal lobe or Wernickes area destroys a person's ability to comprehend written or spoken language, although he can still, himself, speak normally. When these types of brain damage occur, can the immaterial non-local form of your consciousness still perform these tasks? Again, it must be quite frustrating for the non-local consciousness when his robot like receiver on Earth can't! He's up there multitasking and sequencing properly, making moral judgements, but that silly body on Earth isn't doing what he wants!If memories are not stored in the brain, why are they unavailable to subjective conscious experience when the brain is damaged? If memories are part of the immaterial consciousness, why should memories fade at all? Some specific examples:Memories have been localized to even individual neurons in the brain, although researchers did not expect it. Researchers have also been able to erase or create memories in laboratory animals. One lady in a medical study who suffered a stroke could not identify or remember the names of fruit. Her intelligence, vocabulary and memory seemed normal in every other respect, and she could identify other common house hold objects - a spoon, a hammer, a chair, a toaster, a tooth brush. But bananas, apples, oranges, or any other kind of fruit were all gone from her memory. Another woman had brain surgery for an aneurysm. She said she felt normal, the only thing she noticed afterwards was that she could no longer tell time from a dial face clock. She could from a digital clock, but not the kind with the numbers in a circle and big and small hands, that she had understood since she was five years old. What are hallucinations? How are they explained in terms of an immaterial consciousness?I can explain hallucinations if the qualia of consciousness is generated by the brain itself - for example, the hallucinations that result from temporal lobe seizures. But how would the immaterial consciousness create a hallucination and at the same time mistake it for reality? Again, you can't blame it on the brain as a faulty receiver, because according to you, conscious experience isn't generated or experienced in the brain. If Obama is not inside the TV, then neither is your hallucination of Obama in the TV. The only way one can tell qualia of sensation from hallucinations is by applying rational thought processes if one is able. Say for example, I hallucinate there are five or six baboons running about my living room. I see them. I hear them. Perhaps I even feel one of them brush against my leg and I jump out of the way. But reason tells me, “I live in Canada. It is highly unlikely baboons have gotten into my house. Perhaps it was those wild mushrooms I ate.” I may doubt whether the qualia are “real” or are qualia from hallucinations, but if the hallucination is generated by my brain chemistry, it won’t go away simply because I have done that - I won’t stop seeing the baboons. If the hallucination is generated by my immaterial consciousness, it should vanish instantly as soon as I negate its reality (thanks to my ample supply of free will.)If you do attribute hallucinations to the malfunctioning brain instrument, why is the immaterial consciousness unable to distinguish between the false qualia the brain produces, and the real qualia that it produces? Do both brain generated-qualia and consciousness-generated qualia have an identical “raw feel?” Why would the brain be capable of generating qualia, only when it’s malfunctioning, but be unable to, when it’s not. Or to use your tv anaology, how can a broken TV set create a tv program that doesn’t exist, but be unable to create one (only broadcast) when its working properly? It shouldn’t be able to at all, according to your theory, because TV sets don’t create programs, and brains do not generate qualia or conscious experience.Some other questions to consider:Why is consciousness developmental, and correlate with biological brain development if it does not require it? Why does increasing mental ability or intelligence correlate with increasing brain complexity in nature if it doesn’t require it? Carter says the “dependence of consciousness on the brain for the manner of its manifestation in the material world does not imply that consciousness depends upon the brain for its existence.” Regardless, if I can only experience my own consciousness through its “manifestation” by the brain, I am dependent on my brains existence and its operation for my subjective experience of consciousness either way. Without the brain, I would have no access to the non-local immaterial consciousness, even if it existed. Popper and others say that new theories replace old theories when a new theory has better explanatory power. You are asking people to replace neuroscience, which explains many aspects of consciousness, but not yet everything, with a new theory that explains no aspects of consciousness. You claim that it will or might, in the future – which is precisely the claim you reject and you use to “falsify” neuroscience and materialism.
Did you at least try to read my relevant posted excerpts on the subject ? Guess not .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/12/2013 16:58:31Folks :It never fails to amaze me how the people sharing the same thoughts via their similar underlying a-priori held beliefs , are inclined to agree with each other ,no matter what , while rejecting the views of other people who happen not to agree with them : that's a form of confirmation bias .If you wanna avoid the latter , you will have to be open to all views out there on the subject , not just stick to your own that seem to be confirmed by people who do think like you do .I'm very confident Sir, that you have your own group of individuals that can lend support to your common beliefs, or more appropriately; YOUR FAITHTo do nothing more than continue to repeat something you can't demonstrate with evidence IS EVIDENCE that your opinions are nothing more than FAITH. And FAITH will get you nowhere in a science forum.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/12/2013 20:34:54Yeah, right : i lack many things , i have many flaws ...[]Quotethat does not make the fact go away that materialism is false , and hence the mind is not in the brain , or the mind is not brain's activity You wish. The evidence continues to accumulate consistent with a material explanation, and none whatsoever consistent with a non-material explanation. Can you even describe what evidence consistent with a non-material explanation would look like?
Yeah, right : i lack many things , i have many flaws ...
that does not make the fact go away that materialism is false , and hence the mind is not in the brain , or the mind is not brain's activity
... In the particular case of those experiments you mentioned , i think, personally, that they were designed as to confirm the mainstream 'scientific world view " on the subject of brain and mind ,to the point where those experiments were suggestive and confirmatory , in the sense that the subjects under "investigation " were told to perform particular decisions-making via specific instructions on how to perform them .Those specific instructions went through the subjects' in question sensory -"inputs " to their brains first , that's why those scientists who were conducting those suggestive experiments through their suggestive confirmation bias ,in the above mentioned sense ,that's why they detected neurons' firings before those subjects were aware or conscious of their decisions.
... We should thus be looking for non-materialist falsifiable theories of consciousness ,basta .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/12/2013 17:08:59... In the particular case of those experiments you mentioned , i think, personally, that they were designed as to confirm the mainstream 'scientific world view " on the subject of brain and mind ,to the point where those experiments were suggestive and confirmatory , in the sense that the subjects under "investigation " were told to perform particular decisions-making via specific instructions on how to perform them .Those specific instructions went through the subjects' in question sensory -"inputs " to their brains first , that's why those scientists who were conducting those suggestive experiments through their suggestive confirmation bias ,in the above mentioned sense ,that's why they detected neurons' firings before those subjects were aware or conscious of their decisions.In fact, that wasn't the case at all; quite the opposite. The researchers did expect to see causal effects entirely within the brain, but they were expecting to see an initial wave of neural activation in the frontal lobes and posteromedial corticies corresponding to the subject's conscious awareness of making the choice or decision to act, followed by a sequence of activations leading to motor cortex activity that would directly cause the action. This sequence of conscious awareness of decision followed by activity resulting in action is intuitive and seems sensible; they had no reason to expect anything different. When they found prior activity well before conscious awareness, they were puzzled. They repeated the experiment several times with the same results before publishing. Other researchers were skeptical about the experimental quality and whether the prior activity was related to the voluntary decision at all, so in an attempt to expose any mistakes, they redesigned the experiment to reduce the possibility of error (the second link I posted) and replicated it. They got even clearer results, and it has subsequently been demonstrated that it is possible to predict the decision or choice made before the time when the subject says they were consciously aware they'd made it. Because these results were so unexpected, the experiments have been replicated in various ways with the latest technology, and the results are now widely accepted. You may wish to try to explain these results in terms of the immaterial, but you can't just dismiss them as mistaken.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/12/2013 21:30:58... We should thus be looking for non-materialist falsifiable theories of consciousness ,basta .How? []
Quote from: dlorde on 10/12/2013 21:48:46Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/12/2013 21:30:58... We should thus be looking for non-materialist falsifiable theories of consciousness ,basta .How? []I don't know about Mr. Don..........., but I intend to use my 5 senses. All of which can be used to measure and provide empirical evidence!!You're not winning this argument Don......................
Quote from: dlorde on 10/12/2013 21:48:46Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/12/2013 21:30:58... We should thus be looking for non-materialist falsifiable theories of consciousness ,basta .How? []Silly question : It's a bit like saying : if one detects flaws in or unexplained anomalies or unexplained phenomena ...by classical physics , before the time of Einstein, then, there is no way to disocover the still unknown at that time future relativity theory discovery , or quantum mechanics .New scientific discoveries through the evolutionary nature of science might deliver the answer to your silly question thus : only time will tell then .
... This might sound silly or insane ,but i can only speculate about this...
... This might sound silly or insane ,but i can only speculate about this