OK, so you're saying that some fundamental substance is not material, but material is based upon it? That's conceivable, at least. I have reasons to say that it would still be material, but that would just be a semantic argument. Call it whatever you want and divey up the terms wherever you want, it won't make any difference to me.

Sound is a physical phenomenon. It is the disturbance of atoms through some physical medium, whether gas, liquid, or solid. So if this is what you mean by neutral monism, I would call this physicalism/materialism/naturalism (take your pick of terms, it is irrelevant--the point is tha tthey all are things that interact due to sharing ontological staus as existing in spacetime and being measurable).

What immaterial quantity? What is immaterial in sound?

Acquired Brain Injury blindness? Um, well, the part of the brain that processes the data sent from the eye has been damaged, hence the data is not processed correctly (or at all, in some cases).

I should have been more clear, but I simply assumed that you understood that after the eye sends the data, it has to be processed in the brain. The more interesting question would have been blindsight, which is where the processing occurs, just not on a conscious level. To me, that's very telling about the relationship between different parts of the brain, conscious awareness, and the influence of non-conscious processes that effect behavior.

Shaun

True, it wouldn't, but it would serve to prove that there is something beyond the material world we live in.

The definition above, though satisfactory, leaves me with a question hanging.  Its been nagging me for quite a while now, and i couldn't place it or articulate it until now.  Here goes:

 The definition of thoughts being material (electric impulses in the brain) serves to define it only at the point of its creation.

I just realized, i want to be able to define it at the point after its creation.

So to illustrate, when i decide to write a thank you note to a friend for a gift, thoughts are created as follows:

1)  Brain fires up, creates thoughts. (material)

2)  I write my thoughts down on a hallmark card (material)

3)  card is mailed to my friend (??????)

4)  friend reads card, understands my message/thought (material)

Or another way of illustrating my story is below: 

                 Brain             |    No Brain                  |   Brain

          electrical impulses  | no electrical impulses    |elec. imp.

                    |               |            |                    |      |

               material           |????????????????          | material

thoughts ---------------------------------------------------

At certain points in time (when there is a brain), thoughts are material because of the electrical impulses it generates.  But at other points (when there is no brain) no electrical impulses are generated at all, which is why i put a question mark on it.

True, the thoughts or symbols on the hallmark card are useless and meaningless without a brain to interpret it, but it still exhists even when there is no brain.  Proof of such is when a brain is again introduced, the symbols on the card elicit the same electrical reactions in the brain.

What i therefore need to know is how to define thoughts in a material way when the brain is not present.  The thoughts are still there.  Albeit in a different form, since no electrical impulses can be detected it at that point.  If i say that the thoughts are the card,  it doesn't really sound satisfactory as an explanation. (to me)

Can someone help me here? 

I would argue that when it is on paper or the card iit is not a thought until somebody reads it. When nobody is observing the graphite on papyrus there is nothing. It only becomes a thought after it is processed by somebody's brain or before when it was produced by the brain. Sort of like "If a tree in the forest falls and nobody hears it, did it really fall."

Eloise: I am having trouble following your arguement. I will say that my arguement about the frontal lobes is that computers cannot do those things that we are able to do with our frontal lobes. Those things make it look like we have some sort of immaterial power that the computer doesn't have. I don't see the analogy to light blindness. Unless you are saying you can program a computer to see the entire spectrum or something. Even then I don't understand how some of what your saying applies. Maybe I am just stupid, but could you dumb it down for me. Thanks.

This is just plain illogical. It does not exist. Those words are meaningless without something that understands what they mean. The only thing that understands what they mean is a brain. The thought came up in one persons brain and they wrote it down. That person continues to think about the card in THEIR brain. The thought is still neurochemistry. The other person is unable to read the words until they process it in their brain. Once you realize this, you other questions are pointless. The paper/card is nothing without a brain. Words are a method of communication about thoughts between brains. The thought does not exist on paper, it exists in peoples brains. I don't see why this is so hard to grasp.

No this is wrong. Of course there is no one-to-one mapping. However, small changes in the chemical and neuronal materials between my brain and your brain does not completely change how you and I interprent the idea of "1". Remember, our DNA is very similar to each others and our brains are made up of the same material. Two Volkswagon Golfs are not the same, but they are made up of the same material that perform the same functions. Our hearts, sex organs, livers, kidneys, lungs, and so forth operate in the same manner across people. Why would we not hold the same for our brains. Yes, how information gets encoded and what is encoded and formed is somewhat different from person to person. However it is still proteins, serotonin, GABA, and dopamine.

Again, this is shown in that all of us have our visual centers in the occipital lobe. This is common across all of us. Brain functions are found in the same parts of the brain across people.

There would be no such idea of the number "1" without a brain to come up with it. Unless somebody thinks about it, there is no "1". One is a symbol that our brains came up with. Similar brains that came about from similar DNA. We are only unique in those small DNA changes and our experiences. Just because the material is slightly different or .00000000000001 nanometers in different parts of the brain, does not mean that the idea of "1" in that brain is so drastically different.

Hmmm... Let me try to go through your points one at a time.

So what you are saying is that my thoughts which i wrote in the thank you card, once no one reads them, no longer exist? So how does this happen? Do the letters, words or phrases conveying my thoughts that i wrote down on the card suddenly disappear only to appear all of a sudden when someone opens the card to read what it says? Does the card suddenly become blank when no one reads it? Please elaborate on this, because from my point of view, it doesn't sound very logical to me.

I'd like to ask you a question if i may.

Do you remember every post that you made in this forum? Can you recall or picture in your mind every comma, period, letter, word phrase or sentence you wrote down on all your posts?

Probably not.

Does that mean all your posts no longer exist? Or that only the posts which you can remember are the ones to remain?

Not really.

Unless the webmaster or web administrator deleted or edited your posts, they are all still in the forum.

Every thought, idea, joke, conjecture, every emotion that you typed on your posts are still there for anyone and everyone to read and interpret.

Or by your explanation, does it mean that the thoughts and definitions of words found in the Webster's Dictionary in my house no longer exists because at this point no one is reading it?

Although a thought can linger in the brain for a while, it will eventually fade and be forgotten.  So even though i remember the thoughts that i wrote down, i will eventually not think about it and from the point in time that i no longer think about it and to the point in time that it is read by the recepient, (which could be hours or days) my thoughts are in no one's brain, but it remains conveyed in my thank you card.

 Ok. Let me put it to you this way.  So when i write down on a piece of paper my thoughts, its material composed of chemical reactions in the brain.

But after i write it down, after a while i leave it and forget about it.  And since i no longer think about it, it is no longer a thought.

so what is it? What is that thing that i wrote down on the piece of paper that was once a thought but no longer is?

 Or did I misinterpret what you said? If i did, then please explain that i may understand what you meant to say.

curiousjorge,

Here's what you are missing. The information, the meaning of the words, are encoded in my brain when I think them. If I intend to encode them onto symbols on a piece of paper, I first need to learn the standard shapes if the symbols that represent them, and then using the syntax rules, grammar, and vocabulary that we already know in our heads from language learned previously, we form the symbols using the hand, typewriter, computer/printer, etc that we need to make our note.

The thoughts in our brain can be translated into a movement of the hand, translating the physical thought into an action that creates a series of shapes on the page that encode the thought into written language. At this point, if the brain can stop thinking about that message, the information is stored in memory for later retrieval, and then no longer exists consciously in any way. But the encoding in memory within the brain is comparable to the encoding on the paper. Both are physically encoded, and possible to be retrieved. The method of storage and retrieval is different, but in either case the encoding is physical.

So while the letter is in the mail, the information is stored via written language. If, while the letter is in the mail, you think about the message you sent, you have retrieved it from your memory--physically encoded brain structures. When the letter is received, opened, and read, then the information is processed by the reader and made into a conscious, physical thought by them. They can now encode that thought into their memory for later retrieval.

The information was passed through physical means. At some points in this passing of a thought (the days it takes to reach the recipient) it is mostly an encoded message, and not a conscious one unless thought of specificially. So the information is physical during that time (in written language), but it is not conscious thought during that time necessarily (although it could be thought of).

The thought does not disappear, while in transmission, but it is simply not held in conscious awareness necessarily.

Now, concerning the issue of things like emotion, concepts, etc that are not thought of as being physical;

The emotion itself is surely physical. Emotional states are states that the body is in. Certain hormones are released, some organs take action, and some chemicals are raised or lowered in quanity in certain parts of the brain changing the nature of our awareness at the time being. All of these changes are physical, and I don't think anyone is arguing yet.

But what about the feeling of the emotion. This is the question of qualia, and has been handled by philosophers, scientists, and other laymen more informed than myself. I would suggect you read about the proble of qualia, and I'll point you to a couple very good sources.

Daniel C. Dennett Consciousness Explained (1991)

Antonio Damasio The Feeling of What happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (2000)

Douglass Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach (OK, that one might be asking too much--but I HIGHLY recommend this book). Try this one instead; IAm a Strangle Loop (2007--just released recently!).

There are others, such as:

Paul Churchland

Patricia Churchland

V. Ramachandran

and Thomas Nagel.

I cannot possibly do the concept of qualia--the feeling of conscious experience--justice in explaining how it is a physical process in a post on a forum. It is counter-intuitive for many people how a concept is physical, but once you start to see how it works, you have trouble seeing how it could be thought of as non-physical.

But don't take my word for it, read the literature and decide for yourself. It's a debate that is still lively between dualists, physicalists, and others in the field. However, the evidence seems to be pointing strongly towards a physicalist's interpretation, and dualists are left with the interaction problem I referred to in an earlier post.

Shaun

Shaun

if i may try to simplify the thought transmission issue, or rather phrase it more laymen's terms...

when you are writing on the paper, you are not literally placing your thoughts on paper.  you are placing ink on paper.  the ink forms symbols which may be recognized by another, and then responded to.

if you were placing your *thoughts* on paper, and the paper was viewed by an infant (assuming that thoughts are inherently commutable) that infant would instantly know your thoughts, even if it were too young too read, and even if its brain had not yet developed to be able to experience as complicated a thought as yours.  obviously this is not the case.

if matter can be neither created nor destroyed, once you placed your thoughts on the paper, you would no longer possess them, any more than were you to mail your hand to your friend.  sometimes you say something to somebody and they completely misconstrue what you said; is this a failing of your thoughts, or of their delivery?  it must indeed be the latter, for if you could make your *thoughts* known, the recipient could not possibly misconstrue them.

there is no middle area.  there is no travel time during the mailing.  your thoughts are not in the envelope.  only ink.  only symbols meant to represent your thoughts.

it's like the belief that a photograph captures a moment (or your  soul).  obviously it does neither, no more than does leonardo's mona lisa contain any physical aspect of her being.  it is only paint on canvas, nothing more; only a representation of the subject, and not the subject itself.

now here is where i get a little fuzzy, and i will again offer the disclaimer that i only barely know what the fuck i'm talking about. and hope that somebody who does can put this into more accurate terms...

ahem.

our thoughts are the product of bioelectrical/biochemical activity (indeed, and as shaun has shown, hormones and other fun stuff too).  electricity is material.  chemicals are material.  neurons are material.  they can be observed, measured, and interacted with.  when you die, so do your thoughts.  the neurons which once housed those thoughts die with the body, and thus are the thoughts gone, just as the blood which once ran through your veins. 

though we may like to romanticize emotions as being these transcendental, wondrous, inexplicable things, more likely they are quite scientific and mathematical (albeit curently beyond our quantification).  we ought not fall into the trap there is no magic where there is science!  whether love is transcendant, or a maniacally complex equation, is it any less powerful?  would you suddenly love your wife/child/parent less if you were able to deduce it mathematically?  of course not.  you would still swoon to your wife whispering in your ear, still choke up to hear your 2-year-old singing "the little drummer boy" in the back seat, still feel that wonderful warmth of love and comfort from your mom's hug.

there is magic in the material world, in the physical, in the quantifiable, that it is so prosaic as to be nothing more than particle interaction only makes it all the more wondrous, not less!

Hi RSchema thanks for replying,

What I am saying applies generally to this consequence of electrodynamic modelling. To say that the model is wholly sufficient for describing the activity of the brain is contrary to the results we get from computation. Frontal lobes can do things that computers can't and we do know that this is at least partly due to an insufficient model at the outset. The human capacity for complex judgement is not the simplistic consequence of computation we once thought it could be, strong AI answers this problem by saying that it could still be a consequence of computation in higher arrays, which seems right for a probable mind but not necessarily a human one which has a tendency to argue with itself, if you add this ability to a complex computational array it comes out less resilient than the human, less likely to recover its senses in a crisis. Although the model sufficiently addresses an artifical sentient ability, it falls short of sufficiently comprising the human mind, there are things you simply shouldn't add to a closed system.

I think it is an immaterial difference in certain frames of reference, the human mind can pluck out an irrational stopgap and restitute a harmony which need only exist on an imaginary level God, for instance . The human mind can exponentiate quietness, therefore it is not purely a computational instrument but also an imaginative and spontaneous one and this is an important distinction because it's immaterial in the most profound way, like quantum tunneling, a human mind can simply 'get past it' without doing any work. So essentially I am saying here not that strong AI isn't intelligent, it is, rather I am saying it isn't human, it doesn't represent human, there is something more to human consciousness.

I think you have it in a nutshell there RSchema, this is what I am talking about, the basis of matter is both unitary and spectral and that is where I question material monism it firmly holds that there is one direction, unitary to spectral, but I don't think that is how an open system works. There is a spectral to unitary direction as well, a simple argument for it was already given by wavefreak, what entails a significant difference between our concepts of 1? the answer, I think, is the spectral arrangement that comprises 1 outside the mind, but this won't mesh with the idea that thought is simply the end product of a material brain, this part of the material brain, the 1 neural, is therefore also the unitary product of something that you could quite possibly call the universe's thought.

That's ridiculous. The order of the symbols is important. Similarly, if I took apart my TV and then re-aranged the parts in a different structure, would the TV work? Probably not. The order of the letters make up the information, not the letters themselves. The difference in arrangement of the characters is essential.

In linguistics, we see that letters, sounds, etc can be thought of in terms of phonemes. These are the sounds that we can make, and by putting them together in certain structures, we create morphemes. These morphemes have meaning, and by stringing them together, we come up with concepts, stories, descriptions, etc based on the syntax of language. The order of these phonemes and morphemes is critical in making the difference between nonsense and meaning or two very different meanings.

It is somewhat analogous to the way we put things like televisions together. We have all the parts, but the parts don't do anything until you put them together in certain ways. Now, perhaps I could take my TV apart and make soemthing else, but this would be sort of like an anagram. You can't simply put it in any order and have it be the same.

By changing the order of the letters, you change the meaning of the string of letters. The parts themselves are nothing until they are structured in such a way as to represent something based on linguistic rules. Something is not the same physically simply because the parts are the same. The structure of the parts is essential.

Further, the presence of a brain is essential. Without a device or machine of some sort that can perceive the symbols and either determine that it is a meaningless soup of letters or a message (even one that might have errors in the structure somewhere (typos), but not so egregious as to not be decipherable), the string of letters will simply not be perceived, so asking if it is meaningfull is nonsensical.  The distinction between nonsense and meaning can only be made by things--like brains--that have the ability to perceive the symbols and analyze them according to linguistic rules.

I hope that helps.

Shaun

I should have said that the symbols now encode a message which has meaning for something that is capable of interpreting it. To have meaning is to have meaning for some person, machine, etc that is capable of comprehending a meaning.

To say that the meaning is not somehow inherent in the symbols themselves seems to be nonsensical.  The symbols exist independently, without being seen or otherwise prehended.  However, the meaning arises from things like brains which decode the symbols into a process of conscious thought.  The symbols encode the meaning, but they don't contain meaning.

Shaun