Unfortunately, your essay leaves open attack via simple logic: You concede that 'everything that exists is material' and you claim that 'the mind exists', so by simple deduction, you must concede that the mind is material.

I think you should rethink your use of the term 'immaterial'. How you are using it is the same as 'abstraction', which I think is better as it avoids potential confusion. In philosophy of mind ‘immaterial’ tends to be used (by dualists) in the traditional philosophical sense so your use of the term will probably be rather confusing (In fact I bet many people will see the title of the thread and think: “not this shit again!”). I think “abstraction” is a far more practical term.

However, the way the tod and I are defining immateriali is the same way that the theists are: Not based on the physical. Having no physical constituents. Also, I do not subscribe to reductionism. I hover on the fence between reductionism and emergentism. I generally hold that the mind is emergent not reductionist. However, it is still material.

But this could only be done if we defined “immaterial” as an emergent entity from a materialist system!

I would say that the mind is a process, not an entity. I made this point here:

This one is not a consequentialist argument, but it is terrible all the same. It essentially states the materialist cannot account for abstraction, which is to say that things like thoughts, emotions, actions, or even (this is the worst) information cannot be accounted for under the physicalist worldview.

And there is in turn a causal event which caused the decision to drop the ball to made and in turn an event which translated the intent into execution into action.

You are talking about the procedure of brain-mapping. Here is what we do.

OK, that is simply untrue. The way you are defining immaterial is fundamentally different from Descartes. Descartes view was ridiculous. He believed the mind was a separate agent from the physical world. The poor guy was crushed by neuroscience. The view you are advocating is not that the mind is a separate agent, but rather a lower ontological category than the physicality which generates it.

Er, no, that is highly inaccurate. The decision and desire and belief all have causal structure! I can show that using neuroscience.

Kant’s view is not supported by modern neuroscience. We do not take it seriously.

dividing the axis of the brain causes the loss of executive function! And then...when we repair it, it returns. Would this be possible if it were not determinate or causal or generated by the material?

Strafio and I have been discussing this topic recently, and unless he has changed his mind, he holds that the physical brain and the mind are not linked in any way, that they are in entirely separate contexts, as such, according to his view, it is an error to talk of the mind in the context of the brain.

Maybe. I think I was trying to achieve too many things at once with this topic and it just got muddled. I re-defined immaterial at the beginning on the basis that the 'traditional' version was incoherent and didn't really capture the way people use it. This topic was also written for theists as well as and was trying to give a naturalistic explanation of their 'dualism' to the mind.

I made a special point of noting that I had re-defined 'immaterial'.
It was even in the bit that you quoted.
I guess my argument for re-defining immaterial ought to have been a topic in itself rather than a couple of lines in this one.
On your position of mind, I got the impression that you had a respect for emergentism but prefered reductionism. Emergentism would be 'immaterial' under my definition (as you noticed yourself).

I like to think that my 'linguistic reductionism' (I've decided to call it that) would be appealing to emergentist as it gives a positive explanation to many emergentism intuitions. As far as I'm aware, the arguments for emergentism are either intuition based or negative. They have the intuitive idea of the mind, and say "not dualism" because of the metaphysical contradictions and "not reductionism" because of intuition based arguments. From what I've heard, the position is attacked for having no positive explanation for various things, like the gap between mind and body.

A last clarification was that this wasn't meant to be attacking your and Todangst's arguments or defending theism. I probably didn't make this clear but I did use the points you both made as the starting points, trying to re-define immaterial in a way that appeals to people's intuition and is both coherent.

You have an assumption here, that materialism is the only system.
The main point of the first section was to show such assumption to be unjustified. We use language in a variety of ways. Sometimes we use it to describe the world (i.e. the material system) and sometimes we use it for other purposes in which case the concepts involved will follow different rules.

Fair enough. I'm familiar with functionalism too.
However, functionalism is still using materialistic language.
Materialism states that "everything is matter and motion".
Although I do think that although some mental concepts have a functional behaviour.

This is an argument against materialist metaphysics and I agree with you that it doesn't work. My argument wasn't trying to refute materialist metaphysics but show that materialist metaphysics was irrelevent to the concepts mind, as both use different language that follow different rules

This is the kind of statement that I specifically set out to refute with this topic. It works on the premise that every physical event has a cause. I specifically denied that a decision was a physical event, just that it was a concept that was linked to a physical event through the link of 'correct application of concept'.

So the physical event that the 'decision' supervened over might've had a physical cause, but the 'decision' itself wasn't a physical concept so didn't require a physical cause.

Yeah. That's what I had in mind.
The point I was trying to make was as follows:
You use a technique to find the physical state of the mind when the person is in a state of desire, say. So you use the brain mapping to find out what the brain is doing. However, how do you know that what the brain is doing here is desire?

All the technique is about finding out what is going on in the brain.

That the person is in a state of desire doesn't seem to require such techniques. Instead we are just applying the word 'desire' as we always do. So what we are matching the state of the brain to is the times when we consider it appropiate to apply the mental concept of 'desire'.

Descartes' intuition was mostly sound.

His argument from his intuitions to substance dualism were subtly flawed, but we can see where he was coming from. He saw that mental concepts are non-spacial, that the concepts of the mind were logically separate from the body.

However, he then went and stole the concepts of 'existence' and 'substance' from the material world. Once he'd made that subtle error his arguments followed so logically that many philosophers went on to try and deny his intuitive pictures about the mind in order to try and restore coherence.

It can only be shown if 'belief', 'decision' and 'desire' are definable in the language of science.

My argument specifically gave the possibility (and argued for it too) that our mental concepts were from a different use of language rather than describing the world.

Earlier I admitted that I agree that some mental concepts have a functional (and therefore causal) structure, but we don't use all mental concepts in this way.

It appears that you missed Kant's entire argument.

Neuro-science is a practice within the system of understanding of empiricism - describing the world. Kant's point was that's not the only system of understanding. If, as Kant said, the concepts of the physical world and the concepts of the mind are from two different forms of understanding then the results of neuro-science can hardly refute this as they merely give results within the 'physical mode of understanding'.

Yes. Remember my link between mind and physical conditions?
The there are physical conditions when it is appropiate to apply mental concepts. So there is a link between the dividing the axis of the brain and it's physical effects, and when we apply certain mental concepts.

Although some mental concepts appear to be functional or causal, certainly not all of them.

Slight correction.
I hold that they do not have a physical connection like cause.
However, that doesn't mean that they aren't linked in any way - that would be contradicting neuroscience and some of our most important intuitions about the mind.

I just specified a certain sort of connection.
The connection is that certain mental concepts are applicable only when certain physical events happen. So in the same way 'hello' is applicable when you meet someone, "Jim has decided to throw that ball" is applicable when the body is making a certain motion.

You haven’t defined what you mean by “immaterial”

We are not dealing in philosophy of language here! We are dealing in epistemology and ontology.

The whole point of my essay was to show that non-material concepts are absurd and contradictory and commit stolen concepts.

But the whole point of the part in bold about apraxia was that I showed that decisions are physical.

What are you talking about. We are finding out what areas of the brain process different functions and stimuli. That’s it. I have no idea why you invoked desire.

I am finding your argument almost impossible to grasp. You aren’t arguing from ontology or epistemology or science. You are arguing from language. It is irrelevant.

If you have then my position fails.
However, I don't think that you have.
If you point me to the justification one last time then I'll take another look, but I suspect that you'd just made the assumption that a 'decision' is a descriptive empirical concept. Not a particularly bad assumption to make but it's questionable.

know wish to turn to the interaction problem. This is a huge problem which immaterialists must overcome. Let us take a step back and examine the brain. The brain is efficiently organizing your physical reality. It is taking sensory data from the world as well as perceptive data from places such as the tubes in your inner ear and receptors on your skin, and organizing all of it so that you can function. At the same time, it is performing involuntary functions which the higher cognitive area of the brain (you) have no control over such as the contraction of the stomach, the beating of the heart and the secretion of the exocrine glands. Meanwhile, it spends a large amount of time just talking to itself. Intelligence can be directly correlated with cerebral cortex activity which is measured by EEGs. Let us imagine a thought and write it as a neuroelectrochemical circuit. It begins with sensory data which is converted into electrical signal and analyzed by the brain, which in turn, is wired to the hippocampus for retrieval of the corresponding mental state, which in turn is accompanied by an appropriate release by the exocrine glands in the neurotransmitter which corresponds. Let us think of an example. You are a chocoholic, imagine for a moment, and you see, on the table, a bar of chocolate. The first thing that happens is that photon waves which are captured by your eyes are converted into electrical signals, whereby the brain reassembles the image, then, with the primary visual cortex in communication with the visual association cortex, and that in turn in communication with the hippocampus for memory retrieval, an appropriate mental state is triggered by the release of a corresponding chemical from the hypothalamus. In this case it would be endorphin, hence triggering the appropriate response, that in turn being handled by the trigeminal nerve and the prefontal cortex, whereby you open your mouth and say “that tastes good”.

What we can see is that the brain is a clear, tangible, distinct, physical entities which generates thoughts, emotions and mental states via neural networks in communication in a causal relationship with sensory integration. Yet the three I just mentioned are held by dualists to be the domain of a “soul”. The soul is acausal, atemporal, intangible etc. How does the physical brain, which, by the way, seems to handle those processes just fine, interact with this timeless, acausal, non-physical “essence”. I am not going into my usual modus operandi which dictates that I point out the ontological invalidity of this concept except to ask this question: What does it mean to say the soul “resides” inside the brain? How can the soul account for differences in personality and intelligence and the different conscious experiences that stretch across the human experience if it has no substance and hence no composition? Just what the hell does the term “a soul” mean when that implies numerical divisibility. To say that each person has a “soul” is incredibly silly since the soul is neither divisible nor physical, which means that to attempt to give it quantifiable property (ie one soul, two souls etc) is just ridiculous. The materialist can easily account for the differences in personality, emotion, reason, IQ, conscious experience for he is backed by 200 years of exhaustive research and because physically, each human brain is unique in its folding pattern, as well as the concentrations of neurotransmitters and fundamentals that compose the glial cells, as well as the precise structure and composition of the neural networks and synaptic connections. And of course, there are causal environmental factors to take into consideration.

The interaction problem was the philosophical nemesis of Descartes. But I am not here to pick on him. After all, the man lived 400 years prior to this discussion, I hardly think it necessary to refute a philosophical stance that no scientist alive would take seriously after 200 years of neurological experimentation flatly contradicting him, less forgivable is that Christian dogma has happily espoused dualism and the notion of the "soul" or "spirit" as have nearly every other religion, despite the fact that we live in an age where the extreme success of neuroscience in explaining these once mysterious obfuscations, at least to the point where we can obviously deduce the physicality of such things as the mind and the conscious experience. I would say that Descartes was wrong, but that is irrelevant, seeing as that's obvious, so what I will say instead is that the whole gamut of religions which espouse substance dualism are dead wrong. Christianity, Islam, the like.

I do wish now to turn to memory. Memory may be the closest to an “essence” of a person, although it is still meaningless without other areas of the brain to handle and process them. Your brain is constantly accessing your memories, comparing them, integrating them with your sensory functions and it is fair to say that if the area of the brain which holds your memories is destroyed then it would be difficult to claim that “you” as a person still exist. Destroying part of your memories will result in a significant dip in your IQ points. Despite the fact that the mind is the sum total of the communication of all of the lobes of the brain, it is fair to say that the hippocampus, where memories are stored, is the most important. And guess what? We may have poor understanding of memory formation, but we do know enough to say that it is physical. For one, simply destroying the hippocampus or part of it will destroy memory, for another, as I cited with synaesthesia, memory can be altered by physical disease. It seems the most important player in the formation of memory is a brain function called synaptogenesis, which is the formation of new synaptic connections inside the neural networks.

I now will introduce something called the knock-on effect. The knock-on effect is something of a cruel joke among neuroscientists. When Descartes first developed dualism, it was held as the center of everything. Perception, consciousness, the mind, thought and cognition, even pain. Descartes thusly believed all non-human animals were mere automaton, and this had some gruesome effects, since scientists back then were eager to study the circulatory system, and since they were now informed that animals could not feel pain, they happily nailed animals to planks and ripped their innards out for study. Any suggestion that the animal’s cries were of genuine anguish were laughed off. A mere spring driving the ticking of a clock, the scientists laughed! (I do hope that no scientist today would be captured in a similar sort of dogmatic frenzy, however, we must remember that this did take place before the scientific revolution of the 1700s).

Of course, today we are aware with exactitude of the chemical and physical basis of pain. Pain is a necessary survival instinct, and any organism which has the capability of movement will have the pain mechanism.

So my conclusion is that despite the mysteries surrounding the functions of the brain, we do know enough to say that they are physical, and what most people do not realize is that dualism has been debunked.

There is another, more brutal way to illustrate the physicality of the mind, much more clear than the cutting of the corpus callosum or disassociative identity disorder. It comes in the form of a brutal and most terrible genetic disease called Lesch-Nyhan’s syndrome. It is extremely rare, occurring only in boys and is an in utero mutation on the X chromosome, inherited from the boy’s mother. It has two distinct effects. The first is a stop-codon in the enzyme HPRT making it useless, this enzyme metabolizes uric acid, and the lack of it causes extremely high buildups of uric acid in the bloodstream. But the truly sadistic nature of the disease comes to light in the second distinct effect.

Most people do not realize it, because the situation rarely demands it, but there is no one “Other” that it present in the human brain. Rather, there are two. The human brain is triple-tiered, the bottom contains the primitive brain, then the brain stem and midbrain, and finally, the part where the thinking, conscious being is, the neocortex, the last tier. In situations of dire fight-or-flight, trauma, shock, or anything of the like, the primitive and primal lower tiers take command, controlling adrenaline flow and autonomic functions and instinctual basics, such as sexual urge. This is truly where man’s baser nature is, an ancient evolutionary structure, hopelessly unsophisticated compared with the deep intricacies of the neural networks of the neocortex, whose twisting patters of neural networks and glial cells produces all of man’s genius and creativity and thirst for knowledge.

Anyway, Lesch-Nyhan causes a mutation in the primitive second-tier of the brain, at the brain-stem, where locomotive signals are fired. There are two distinct effects of signal-crossing in the midbrain. The first is that a Lesch-Nyhan child is spastic and assumes an odd “fencer” position, as appearing with one leg diagonally bent and the opposite arm crooked backwards. The second effect is that the midbrain is deranged and the insane signal-firing causes it to “cross” signals with the neocortex. The effects are ghastly. In a fight between the primitive brain and the conscious neocortex, the primitive brain always wins, it has simply been there for a longer course of evolutionary history, it is more ingrained, it overrides the higher functions. Hence, the deranged vertical dividing of the Lesch-Nyhan brain causes the sufferer, during bouts or “attacks” when the signal firing goes berserk, to attack the people around him (always him, girls, having two X chromosomes, cannot get Lesch-Nyhan), and causes intense writhing and seizure-like convulsions. The most brutal effect of this is autocannibalism, the thrashing of the facial muscles causes the boy to eat away their own face, they will often rip out their own palate with their teeth and most of their lip flesh as well. For their own protection, they often have their teeth extracted. It is truly a ghastly disease. For their own safety, they have to be tied down with restraints, otherwise they will viciously attack themselves with their hands. Self-enucleation, removing one’s own eyes, is rare, but it happens. A boy with Lesch-Nyhan’s will not survive much past adolescence. Either from kidney failure or self-injury, most do not see their 20th birthday.

As a genetic disease, Lesch-Nyhan’s is part of my research into vector-based gene therapy. It doesn’t have much money in it, being that it only occurs in one out of every 950,000 births, but I do hope that the research done will alleviate this monstrosity of a disease. However, for the case at hand, it helps, albeit very brutally, to illustrate that the mind can indeed by divided, and that we can point to the neocortex and say, this is where the conscious, thinking “you” resides, not a soul. I hope I have made this point clear.

Let us review

Consciousness: This process, despite being utterly shrouded in mystery, is clearly physical. It cannot be the domain of a fixed, acausal, unchanging “soul” or essence”. The body has the ability to switch it on and off at will, keeps it under careful control, and the conscious process is directly correlated with neural activity, more to the point, the precise way that neurons fire. Neural activity never stops, unless you are dead. The drugs, diseases and patterns which either affect, turn off or turn on the conscious process alter the way neurons fire, hence strongly suggesting that the neural networks which make up the brain are responsible for consciousness and self-awareness.

Emotion: Involuntary. These are controlled by the brain and operate on a neuroelectrochemical feedback loop. Sensory input triggers an appropriate chemical secretion which in turn is responsible for an emotional state.

Cognition: Has been directly linked using neuroangiograms to the temporal lobe and the extremely complex neural pathways inside. Cognition is directly affected by certain chemicals for better or worse, usually worse. Many toxic heavy metals can cause brain damage in utero, conversely, some chemicals like the now popular omega-3-fatty acid can cause a boost in intelligence. Why? Because O3 otherwise known as DHA is the material employed by oligodendrocytes in the lipid sheath which coats the neurons called myelin. Amyelation is the cause of many nasty neurological disorders like MS and ALS. This suggests, of course, that cognition and intelligence, far from being the domain of the “soul” are controlled by neural networks, the improved conduction of electrical signals through which have been directly correlated with intelligence, as well as the synaptic connections which form in neural networks (brain size is not correlated with intelligence, but number of synaptic pathways is). On a side note, Einstein was found to have almost twice the normal amount of myelin in his brain.

Mind: Is the sum total of the communication of all the lobes of the brain, the most important of which regarding the generation of an “I” is the hippocampus. However, cutting the corpus callosum is not the only way to induce the divisibility effect. There are certain other disorders which can do the trick. I am not referring to schizophrenia, which contrary to the delusion offered by popular culture, is not a split-personality. That disease is called dissociative identity disorder.

Personality: The “soul” whatever that means, is not the seat of personality. Personality is fluid and highly plastic, and can change based on neuroplastic change in the hippocampus and memory formation. However, the soul is unchangeable and acausal.

PS I keep referring in the essay to the hippocampus as the domain of memory. This is inaccurate, but I did it for clarity since it is the closest to that function. In reality there is no one area of the brain tied to memory. Memories are stored depending on their classification in different areas of the brain. The hippocampus functions a memory organizer, deciding what to toss out and what memories to keep. Your brain has the ability to delete memories by destroying neural connections by controlled apoptosis, and does this whenever memories fade out of use for too long. This direct relationship between neural networks and memory which is tightly controlled by the brain further debunks the notion that memory, and by extension, a person, is the domain of the soul or has a non-physical "essence".

In closing, I also have multiple other objections regarding vitalism. First, specifically regarding the notion of the “Cartesian Other”, otherwise known as “homonunculus” , which is described in question form as: When we feel pain, what is the “I” feeling the pain, and where is it? When we see, what is doing the seeing? (The homonunculus is the idea that there is a “’little man” watching the images). Well, Firstly, neuroscience has overwhelmingly shown that the idea of a unified mental “control room” is bunk. There is no one part of the brain where consciousness occurs, no one part of the brain where personality is stored etc. The human brain is a triple-tiered structure partitioned into many, many different lobes and sects each dedicated to various different processes. Some are dedicated to vision, others to language, others to music, others to pain, others to visual association, or hearing, or auditory association, or linguistic association, or color recognition etc.

Secondly, whatever the “I” is, I can say with confidence what it is not-magic. This is, after all, in essence what the vitalists are appealing to, the belief that “I” is intangible, and hence cannot be the domain of the material. What is the thing that feels pain when jabbed with a needle? It is most certainly not a obfuscated vital force...you’re acknowledging that every time you have surgery! Furthermore, it may be best to flip vitalist objections on their head to reveal the absurdity of their beliefs. So, the soul is a mysterious, timeless, acausal, non-spatial essence? I would normally say that is a meaningless statement, but that is for another time. For now, I will simply say: How is it even remotely possible that this immaterial is the domain of the “I”? When your eyes are receiving photon packets and converting them into electrical signals to be transmitted across the optic nerve, how is it possible that this data, which is then reassembled into an image by a brain for review by the visual association cortex and sensory somatic cortex (obviously this is an extreme oversimplification, but were I to talk in depth about picture reassembly, you would all be bored to tears, so I shall press on). How is it possible that this distinctly tangible packet of data, physical ,spatial and causal, interact with this mysterious immateriality that is none of these things and that does not even reside in the brain (obviously it doesn’t. Terms like “reside” and “inside” are incoherent when referring to the immaterial). How can this mysterious ether interact with the neuroelectrochemistry. This seems like a reasonable objection, that being: How can this mysterious intangible possibly be a solution to any of the problems of consciousness? It seems like it multiplies the absurdity of the problem by several orders of magnitude. How can it interact with any of the physical functions of the brain at all? If it is atemporal, how does it form temporal and causal thoughts, or process temporal sensory uptakes? If it is non-spatial, how does it analyze spatial data, or interact with spatial chemicals that make up emotional response? What does it do that the material brain cannot handle? And how is it a more cogent solution to these problems than materialism? As I said before, seems it creates a gamut of extra, absurd problems. Human thought does not reside in a magical land that exists outside of space and time. By sitting at the computer screen and reading these perfectly tangible, spatial and coherent words while my prefrontal cortex and visual association cortex are buzzing and ferrying memories to and fro, I am acknowledging this.

The dogma of the soul suggests it is indivisible, unchanging and fixed. An “essence”. This seems little more than deliberate metaphysical obfuscation. And yet...there is no corresponding function of the human brain which matches with such properties (indivisible, unchanging essence). Consciousness and the “Cartesian”? No. The body tunes that all the time, and keeps it on a chemical leash. Despite neuroscientists not having a clue how it works, the body’s chemical pathways seem to manage it just fine...The mind? No. No magical mental control room of complete unification. The brain’s partitioning shows that the various functions which have synergistic interplay to form a mind are created not by a single unified essence but rather the buzzing and humming of many different areas of the brain, each with their own special task to perform. Destruction or damage of parts of the brain result in corresponding loss of function and alteration of the mind, as Gage shows, or indeed anyone with a destructive brain disorder which starts to override cognition, such as Huntington's. Personality? See below.

The closest thing to an “essence” of a person is memory. After all, as I explained before, memory is equivalent to genetics in importance of a person. There is a growing body of research which suggests that a person’s ethical conduct, moral codes and personality are almost entirely dependent on memory. But memory is most surely a physical process. And there is certainly no magic indivisible soul when it comes to memory! It is not stored in any one place, but rather all sorts of different memories pertaining to different brain functions are stored correspondingly. We can even take a picture of memory formation. Here.

In short, there is no brain function which is indivisible and unchanging, and certainly no brain function which is the domain of a mysterious immaterial, atemporal essence which does not even reside inside the brain. There is no function of the brain, not consciousness, not the mind, not cognition, or personality, or memory, which is not open to change, damage or destruction by disease, trauma, injury, chemicals, toxins etc or simply the everyday brain functions like synaptogenesis or serotonin release.

This brings me full circle back to the interaction problem. All of the processes of the brain are fluid continuum processes which change appropriately based on precise arrangements of neurons and concentrations of chemicals and neurotransmitters. They can be altered directly using drugs, chemicals, or injury. They can be switched on or off by the body and by chemical pathways have a direct effect on physical health. By cutting the physical connections in the brain, one can induce an effect whereby the mind is divided. Yet the soul is acausal and indivisible, and also fixed and unchanging. The functioning of the processes of cognition, emotion, consciousness and the mind is antithetical to the dogma which surrounds the “soul”. We know have incomplete biological understanding of many of these things, but like I said, we do know enough about the neural networks and chemical pathways to rule out immaterialism.

The continuum nature of these processes raises interesting questions. Firstly, we don’t have a test for consciousness, which is problematic and raises ethical questions. For instance, until recently it was believed that those in a permanent vegetative state had no consciousness at all, until neuroangiograms confirmed that they actually respond to music, language etc (a neuroangiogram is where a radioactive isotope is injected into the brain which allows the neuroscientists to track blood flow to specific areas of the brain which in turn will show the amount of brain activity in those corresponding parts).

Since we don’t have a test for consciousness and it appears that we are the only animals which have developed language, there is no way to know as of yet whether any of our cohorts in the animal kingdom are conscious. The two best candidates are gorillas and dolphins since they have all passed the self-awareness test and have reasonable (although extremely primitive compared to our own) methods of communication. If consciousness is a process which exists in degrees, whereby there is no clear-cut line for conscious and not conscious unless neurologists draw an arbitrary line based on electrical activity, then at what point in the evolutionary continuum did consciousness develop? Is it with one of our deceased Homo genus ancestors? And, on that same token, at what point in human embryonic development does the conscious process switch on so to speak? These are the questions which the next generation of embryologists, neurologists and neuroscientist can look forward to. I believe the case has been closed on this silly nonsense of the “soul”.

How many of these functions, once thought of the domain of the magical Descartesian immaterial domain, the domain of the mental, are now known to be physical? Perception, learning, association, pattern recognition, pain and movement and language and cognition and intelligence and memory, sensory integration and recognition, emotion and feeling, mechanopercepetion and proprioception, and facial recognition and creativity and humor and logic and rationality...if only Descartes had known, he would weep in shame.

On the “problem” of “free will” and “volition”

The dualist assertion, as supported by the religious dogma it complements, is that the soul is the domain of all things mental, that mental states are a seperate reality from the glands and gristle of the brain (but then...what does the brain do? Surely then it would be vestigial, which is absurd). However, neuroscientists have been shooting those off like flies on a windshield. Even the most ardent or ignorant dualist will be forced to admit that there is physical and causal grounding for mental states. We now have convincing neurological explanations for emotion, reason, cognition, pain, perception etc, and those phenomenon which we cannot (as of yet) explain, we can at least to deduce the physical nature of such phenomenon (consciousness, self-awareness and thoughts). The deductions of physicality are obvious, you tweak a physical thing in the brain, and you get a corresponding change in mental state. An electrode at X produces a physiological effect at Y and a corresponding mental state, chemical X in neuron group Y produces mental state Z and so on. We have a slew of cerebrovascular, genetic, neurodevelopmental, congenital neurophysiological, neurotoxic and neurobiological diseases to attest. Depression (serotonin VGIC channel malfunction and limbic-cortic dysregulation), which causes, well, depression. Alzheimers (amyeloid fatty plaque accumulation), which causes dementia, senile dementia, which does the same, Wilson’s disease (accumulation of copper in the brain causing dementia and Kayser-Fleischer rings), OCD (subcortical circuitry malfunction) causing obsessive-compulsive behaivor, Lesch-Nyhan’s (autocannibalism and insanity, caused by a missing copy of the functioning hypoxanthanine-guanine ribulotransferanse), autism (miswiring of mirror neurons) causing, in extreme cases, total antisocial behaivor, inability to speak, general inability to interact with others, eating disorders are caused by frontotemporal synaptogenesis malfunction, hallucination by cytokine storms in the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, the list goes on and on.

So, in the face of 200 crushing years of neurological evidence, many turn to the icky and hopelessly unscientific notion of “free will”. This is appealling because the brain is a physical machine and hence causal, but “free will” as the name denotes, is indeterminate. Many neuroscientists hence reject the notion of “free will”. I am not here to argue for or against such a notion, except to say this:

The question of free will is merely the other side of the coin of consciousness, the existence of a being which is aware of its existence (subject/object) in relation to the world, and has a concept of “I” and hence is able to make decisions about the the world pertaining to the accomplishment of some goal. Neurologists call this executive function. There is a part of the brain responsible, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), although we are not absolutely sure of the precise mechanism involved. Regardless, we can be quite sure of the organic biophysical nature of the decision making process. As I explained before, this is merely the other side of consciousness, which through a series of very easy deductions, we can, as I have shown, prove to have organo-physical grounding. The “free will” and control you excercise over your actions can be altered, controlled, lost, and switched on and off by physical actions in the brain, as evidenced by the poor Lesch-Nyhan sufferer.

But the term “free will” implies your ability to make decisions is...free. It is surely not. There are a host of factors, both acknowledged and programmed, which influence decision making. It is a highly causal and determinate process, depending on the tempermant of the subject in question (which is partially genetic and partially environmental), the electrical signals which knit together to form your cohesive worldview, this is the science of perception, which I shall cover now, memory, the pattern-recognition engines of the brain, the precise neuroelectrochemical concentration at time of the decision being made, and so on. There is no such thing as “free will”, because the processes by which decisions are made are as causal and hence physical as any biological process we care to name. The dichotomy we must entertain is this: Is there a “you” commanding and controlling your thoughts, or are “you” the sum total of your thoughts? Most of neuroscience, as do I, lean towards the latter. There is no mental control room, and it is most certainly not external of the brain. You cannot control your thoughts. Try it. You are your thoughts, and these thoughts are caused by....a guess, anyone? I would suspect, along with the bulk of evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists, that the subject/object self-perception of higher organisms which generates the illusion of “free will” is a by product of the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex along the Pan/Homo genus. After all, humans are not the only animals to possess this capability, although ours is certainly most fine-tuned. At present, great apes, chimps, macques and dolphins are also among this small set of organisms which acknowledge their existence as a defined being from the world they inhabit, and hence they do not behave like mere automata, as Descartes would have us believe.

In preperation for the next section of discussion, we must turn the science of perception. In scientific terms, this is the mechanism by which the electrical signals from the external and internal world are arrayed and read to assemble a picture of reality for the brain to interpret. That’s what the brain does, it runs a first-class simulation of reality.

This simulation is based on thousands and thousands of data hard points inside and outside the body. First, there are the five exoperceptive senses, which we all know, sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which depend, respectively, on the eyes and optic, trochlear, abducent and oculomotor nerves, the olfactory and glassopharyngeal nerves, the tongue and hypoglossal nerve, the thousands of recepter neurons across the body and the auditory and vestibulocochlear nerves.

Then, there are the lesser known, but equally important introperceptive senses, which regulate balance and spatiotemporal relative position and geometric orientation in the world (inner ear and cochlear tubes) called proprioception, the tracking of movement and muscle memory called mechanoperception (this one is quite remarkable, it is controlled by grid neurons which array a lattice-like projection of external reality, dividing it into grid squares, such that grid neurons corresponding to said squares fire when movement is detected in said squares. Obviously, your brain does not project this onto your vision, as that would be extremely annoying. As a matter of fact, your brain, while efficiently organizing reality, tweaks a lot of things so as not to appear unsettling. For example, the eyes never stop moving, they, even when fixed on a point, are making a jerky motion called sacchares. However, this is extremely unsettling in appearance so the brain eliminates it from the visual projection. It can be detected only by watching someone else’s eyes in the mirror.

There are many introperceptive senses, but they keep inventing new ones as they are discovered, so I shall not mention them all here. The point is that the simulation which the brain runs based on this data is the fundamental requisite of existence for a conscious mind. The mind cannot exist without it. For some hitherto unexplained reason, perhaps psuedo-therepautical, the wealthy sometimes pay to be placed for short periods of time in a total sensory deprivation tank. This is dangerous. Overexposure to total sensory deprivation will cause insanity then death. The sensory processing units of the brain will begin to unravel, as experiments have shown. Imagine a person born more unfortunate than Helen Keller. Not only are they congenitally blind and deaf, but they have CIPA (Congenital insensity to pain with anhidrosis) and ageusia. If I presented this case to a neuroscientist, they would say the baby would die soon after exiting the womb, assuming it has not been born stillborn. The mind cannot exist without the senses.

In addition to the senses and the genetic factors of temperament and chemical concentration across the VGIC arrays, the mind cannot exist without the brain’s pattern recognition engines, without which we would be somewhat like Dory the fish in Finding Nemo, except that in addition to constantly forgetting our own name, we would be unable to walk, talk, or think at all.

Born without a brain

Of the most ludicrous attempts to prove the existence of the “soul”, surely, the so-called “born without a brain” is one of them.

Of course, it is possible to be born without a brain. The precursor to the neural clusters of the brain are called neural tubes, which open and develop around 25 weeks into embryonic development, and partition along the brain’s major longitudinal axis into the four major partitions (prosencephalon, mesencephalon, rhombencephalon and the cerebrospinal fluid duct. The first three then split again into the brain’s sub-partitioning, the prosencephalon develops along the optic ducts and into the precursor of the cerebrum, which contains all of the higer-level functions and partitions (temporal lobe, occipatal lobe, prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe), and the rest develops into the sub-structures of the primary and secondary tiers of the brain, the midbrain, the fluid ducts that run between the lobes, the pons medullas and hypothalamus, the cerebellum and the brain stem.

To be born without a brain is a classed neural tube defect, which occurs around 26 weeks of human embryonic development, with the failed closure of the neural tubes. The most serious of these is called anencephaly. An anencephalactic baby has no isocortex or cerebral hemisphere, in short, they are missing 85% of their brain, the part necessary for higher-level brain function.

Very few anencephelactic babies are born, since it can be detected in utero, and nearly all mothers who learn of the baby’s condition choose to abort it, many of those who are born are stillborn. A very tiny portion remain alive. It is possible to be alive in an anencephelactic state since the brain stem is present, and hence the cardioregulatory center, so the heart will beat. Eventually, however, with no brain, the body will die very quickly (Morpheus, in the Matrix, my favorite film, was correct when he said “the body cannot live without the mind”) the record, I believe, for an anencephelatic baby is one week outside of the womb.

Unsurprisingly, an anencephaltic baby is in a permanent vegetative state, unable to feel pain, unconscious, blind, deaf and dumb. In short, there is no higher level function to speak of. No consciousness develops, no mind etc. They just...exist, although there is no “I” to speak of in an anencephelactic baby.

Anencephaly is not to be confused with a much, much rarer condition called Acephaly, which is the absence of the entire head of a parasitic twin fetus, which appallingly, can survive for a few hours by leeching blood from the heart of its twin.

So, having read the two sections above regarding free will and NTDs, we reach an incredibly obvious conclusion. The conscious mind is not a separate agent from the reality it inhabits (recall especially the section on sensory deprivation and its resulting effect). The ancient Egyptians actually believed the brain to be vestigial. Such ignorance!

Also, conscious awareness, creativity, intelligence, etc. These are functions which develop via the interactive existence of the brain and the world. It is absurd to say that they are somehow separate or come “pre-packaged” in this nonsensical and ridiculous “ether” which is somehow “injected” into the zygote or foetus (whichever, apparently, depends on whether you are Catholic or Protestant. I am trying very hard not to laugh as I write this). They depend on and build from the subject/object nature of human existence, which is why, as I have previously explained, they cannot exist in a baby born with no sensory functions (which would die soon after assuming it survived in utero). It makes no sense to pin these functions on the existence of this magical nonsense being that they are no more separate functions from the physical brain than the liver is separate from the rest of the body, as 200 years of neuroscience confirms. Hence, as I have already exhaustively iterated with countless case studies, diseases, experiments ad infinitum, it is utterly absurd to claim that the mind is a separate agent from the reality it inhabits, which of course, means that there is no soul, being that the mind is not a disembodied entity, which of course, implies naturalism. This in turn, is a direct challenge to the idiocy of theism, since God is claimed to be a disembodied mind, which I have cast serious doubt upon here (or rather, not I, but 200 years of neuroscience).

So, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is indeed a non-physical and non-biological existence for the human conscious mind. As I have shown over and over again, even if such a being did exist, there must logically be some mechanism by which it interacts with the spatio-temporal, material, 1.3 kilos of grey stuff that reside between your ears and the neuroelectrochemical signals which it produces. It cannot exist independently of it. This is totally contradictory to the dualistic worldview and the 2000 years of religious dogma which take up the same position. It also casts impossibility on the notion of life after the death of the brain. But it is surely absurd to claim two such different entities could interact. Non-physical implies no spatial location (x,y,z) and hence, according to general relitivity, no temporal existence either, hence, it is utterly absurd to claim such a mysterious entity could possibly be responsible for any mental function, all of which, including decision-making (a more scientific approximate of the rather silly notion of free will) depend on causality and are hence spatiotemporal. Obviously, we cannot, as of yet, point to a neuroelectrical signal transmitting across a synaptic vesicle and say, this is where “thought X” is occuring, and then go on to explain precisely how neuron Y is causing thought X and so on. but that is merely because we do not fully understand it. The precise relationship between neuroelectrical activity and decision-making and thoughts is not understood, although it may be in time. At present it remains one of the “big ten” Unsolved Problems of Neuroscience. My job is not to provide an answer to that question, but rather to the much more simple statement “Neural activity is causing thought X”. The obvious problem regarding the brain and the "soul" interacting is that one is indeterminate hence acausal. But the nature of the word interaction inherently dictates temporal causality. What else are we to refer to when we say "interaction", could you give an example of "acausal interaction"? How do two things interact if one is not bound by temporal causality? Neither can cause the other? Does interaction not imply one thing acting up another? How can something act upon an entity which is not temporal when causal actions requires one to make reference to temporality? How can one make reference to any sort of interaction when one is temporal and the other is not? That's ridiculous. There is no trichotomy here. Being that the two entities cannot interact, one is vestigial. Either the brain or the soul. Care to guess, anyone, which one it is?

It is up to the nonsense-spouting dualist to answer all these questions, to answer the interaction problem, to account for the success of neuroscience, to answer the evidence against them from neurophysiology, neurotoxicology, neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, cerebrovascular pathology, neuroelectrochemistry and neuropharmacology, and to explain diseases, disorders and events which really should not be if their idiocy is indeed true. But, being that it has long since been debunked, I would be suprised if any stepped up to the plate and confronted the levithian of modern neuroscience- if you are foolish enough to do so...then good luck, and I await your response!

And my argument pointed out that this position relies on an assumption that language only has one use. All your premises were based on the descriptive use of language that we use to describe the empirical world.

The thing is, your position depends on linguistic assumptions that I don't accept. If you're not willing to question them then I guess that this debate can go no further.

So maybe that's the problem.
Didn't you realise that language is more fundamental than any of these?
The rules of logic are determined by the rules of language that we are using.
The most fundamental rules of any discourse will depend on the rules for applying concepts in that discourse. You have a clear mastery of our discriptive language, the style of language that we use for science. However, you have grown so accustomed to the rules of that use of language, you have assumed that they are universal.

Your argument here depends on an equivication on the word dependence. There is a physical dependence as in the following examples:
"This ball not falling to the floor depends on my grip"
"The occurance of a fire depends on my striking the match to cause it"
and there is rational dependence:
E.g. "This table's being green depends on the table having a colour."
"The justification of my belief in gravity depends upon my experience."

Your argument is that knowledge physically depends on physical things. However, we are not looking for the origins of causation here. We are looking for the root of justification, so we are looking for the bottom of the rational dependence.
You used the physical dependence of knowledge on physics to try and conclude the rational dependence of knowledge on physics. That's a straight equivocation.

Physical facts cannot be at the bottom of rational dependence (e.g. the facts of neurology) as they depend on a rational system to justify them. Your position in the quote would land you in an infinite regress - the trail of rational dependence has to end somewhere.

So how do we use the word 'decision' in everyday life?
Are we explaining an empirical phenomena?
What are you trying to achieve when you explain a decision you made to someone? Give them an empirical explanation of what happened, or try and make sense of your action?
When you ask someone why they did something, are you looking for an empirical description of what happened or are you trying to make a different kind of sense of their actions?

When we attribute mental concepts like beliefs and desires to people, we use them to make predictions on what they will do. This is their practical purpose. If someone is an alcoholic then they are more likely to grab the bottle than the abstaining Buddhist. We make sense of our actions for the social purpose of explaining and regulating our actions. This is different to our use of empirical explanations.

 

Why don't you just say that the mind is information and leave it at that? Information is not *matter*,

 

but it is physical, so in that *very specific* interpretation it is 'immaterial' 

Sum up my argument? Fine.
1) Language has many different uses and functions, each with its own rules to suit the task at hand.

2) The discourse of physics is rooted in a particular use/function of language and the rules of this discourse are rooted in this use/function.

3) Other uses of language need not follow the same rules.

 

 

I'll now clear up the point I was making with the word immaterial.
1) Material means 'not material'.
2) Todagnst has shown that in the language of existence, 'immaterial' is incoherent - that everything that exists is material.

 

  3) The language of describing the world and what exists isn't our only use of language,

 So immaterial isn't necessarily incoherent.

 

Substance dualism and theism goes further by saying that immaterial things 'exist', and that's a category error that is the flaw in their system. This is where Todangst refutes them.

So are we clear that material is what we call concepts that are defined within the discourse of discribing the empirical world? Then you would also agree that a concept of a different use, one outside of this discourse, would be describable as immaterial?

Please don’t insult me by using the phrase “presup”. It implies something which is believed as a foundation without evidence. The only reason I believe that the mental states are physical is because

a) I have shown this so

b) Because in the other essay I showed how the concept of anything non-physical existing or doing anything is a category error

But it is. Check it. The definitions we use in neuroscience are essentially the same as the ones we might use in everyday life.

After all, we are trying to explain what people everyday consider to be certain mental functions, so why wouldn’t we employ the same definitions?

But then what are not arguing about anything. If we are not making reference to things which exist, you haven’t refuted my position in the last essay, which means that the concept of God is still totally absurd as I have shown.

All you have shown is that we may use words in everyday language which do not refer to things. But that is obvious!

I do not mean to say that scientific language is the only form of language, however, QED it is the best form of language for describing empirical phenomenon (that is sort of the definition of science). So my argument still holds providing we are describing empirical phenomenon

The word “goodbye” is not referring to anything, nor are conjunctives like “the, but, and”, however, nouns and adjectives most certainly do have to refer to things, otherwise they are nonsensical.

But the problem is, you have not defined the mind. Words are not ambiguities to be tossed around. They have right definitions, and wrong definitions.

You’ve only asserted that a category error is taking place here, but you haven’t offered a definition of the mind which would show this. What do neuroscientists consider the mind? We don’t really know. We define the mind by its functions. Emotion, reason, perception, intuition, memory, intelligence. We define these, in turn, by their physical grounding. How far off is this from our social usage.

Indeed, if your assertion were true, the whole field of neuropsychology would be nonexistent!

So, the functions of intelligence, decision-making, perception, interagency conscious control over functions...which I spent pages explaining...these are not the functions of the mind?

The fact of the matter is, these words do have definitions, and the way we employ them in neuroscience is the same way we employ them in real life.

But you have not defined the mind.

Let’s just look at the apraxia paragraph:

If I was a very poorly skilled brain surgeon, and I opened up a poor guy’s head, and I accidently made an incorrect incision along the corpus callosum:

-He would feel his hand, but not exercise conscious control over it. Different parts of the brain would have disjointed functional control at different times

But when the lobes are reunified, the person can feel his hand and exercise conscious control, as well as kinaesthetic and sensory control.

And you don’t consider this...decision making?

Neuroscience would be a pointless endeavour if the functions we were describing were not the same ones we experience daily.

Again, I challenge the notion that our empirical scientific descriptions are somehow disjointed from our social use.

Quote:

Precisely. Regardless of how one views the mind itself, if you are a materialist then there MUST be a direct link between the brain and the mind.

Strafio based his view largely on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language... that the brain was in the descriptive/physical language-game (context) while the mind was in the social language-game (context). This is precisely why he thinks determinism and libertarian free will are not mutually exclusive, because to him determinism relates to the descriptive discourse, while free will relates to the social discourse, but of course, as you have shown, what he includes in the social discourse (i.e. beliefs, desires, etc) are still part of the deterministic/causal physical discourse.

Precisely. But then our differences are merely petty. What are we arguing about?

 

Strafio wrote:

I admit straight out that I haven't proved that mental concepts must be a different type of language. So far I was just trying to get you to recognise the possibility. I need to convince you of the coherence of my position before I can start bringing forward positive arguments!

I’ve seen you do this before. Have you not considered that it is the positive arguments themselves which may convince him? For instance, I will usually not accept the possibility of anything without some kind of positive argument for it.

Do I get a special award to 15 pages then!!!!? lol

The fact that our natural grasp of mental language points us towards free will - that our decisions are not causally determined, this supports my claim that when people use mental concepts they are using language in alternative way to referencing physical things.

 

I've argued for the coherence of my position.

I've given reasons why it doesn't contradict materialist metaphysics.

In the original post I used the concepts of counter-factual causation and supervenience to show how it could allow for a causal relation between mental concepts and physical concepts, giving a solution to the 'mind-body connection' problem that all non-reductionists struggle with.

 

So far I've merely shown that my position is a coherent possibility rather than the correct one. 

Describing the world is the language we use for science and it is this mode of language that metaphysics is also based on. Everything that we describe is matter and/or motion - material.

They're both misunderstandings and thus abuses of language. The theist cannot get past the idea that theory means guess anymore than you and others can get past the idea that mental concepts must refer to physical things.

Socrastein wrote:

Nobody is arguing that if something is intuitive then it is right. You're making the mistake of assuming that there's some objective standard of language that we gradually move toward as we experiment and discover things about the world. This shows a terrible misunderstanding of language. There is no objectively correct usage of a word, there is only commonly applied usage of a word. You say that our conceptions of mind became more accurate with the advent of neuroscience, but you're committing the mistake I just outlined above.

NOWHERE have I suggested there is an objective standard of language.

All I am saying is that Strafio has only showed that people have intuitive ideas of mind or free will (which no one is even disagreeing with), not whether that intuitive idea is correct, which is the very point under contention.

As deludedgod as shown, it isn’t correct, in fact it is entirely false! And as I said, a creationist could just as well argue that creation seems intuitive but well all know that that would be irrelevant to the truth of evolution.

So that fact that our intuition implies us that we have libertarian free will does not mean we have such free will; the fact our intuition implies that mind is immaterial is highly irrelevant and is certainly not an argument that it is. Anyway, that aside, nowhere have I even said we should ignore the intuitive ideas we have, I think they are important, but not at the cost of understanding how these concepts really work/function.

] Remember that this argument relies on the premise that concepts like desire are physical concepts?

And how do creationists argue their case? By forever dodging their epistemic duty by focusing solely on the other guy's case.

Because there's no way to build a creationist argument that works.

I wonder if there's a connection here... how ironic that our dualist friend brought up the connection to creationists... projection?

So if someone's intuitive grasp says that our concepts of decision making involve 'free will' and 'spontenaity' then it likely reflects how they use it in everyday life.

Reductionists may redefine mental concepts away from our intuitive notion of what we think they are, but so what!? Intuition is just that, an instinct, what feels right, not what is right.

What reductionists do is look at the evidence, see how our mental states actually are as per neuroscience

Now I’m sure your reply will include something like: "but our intuitive notion of mind is how we use them" or "but this is our intuition" and yes, I agree, it is our intuition and it is how we use them. However two problems I have with this response: 1) Everyone used to live according to our intuitive notion of creation...

2) You don’t have to drop the intuitive notion of mind, we can still have our immaterial-like/intangible/mystical (i.e. abstractions) ideas of mind. We just acknowledge a direct link to the brain.

I have to disagree here. People who advocate free will are not advocating the free will of compatalism, they are advocating the free will of theology, which is complete nonsense and doesn’t even serve the purpose it was design for: to absolve god from responsibility.

Free will as we use it everyday is more akin to how the compatalist defines free will, rather than the more absolute free will of libertarianism/theology.

Provide an ontology for non physical concepts.

Defining the immaterial Mind

Todangsts essay argues that nothing immaterial can exist.
I agree with the essay so have decided to go with denying the 'existence' of the immaterial mind - I've decided that the question of "does the mind exist?" is a bit like "what is the weight of yellow?" is a category error.

 

  So if the mind isn't a 'thing' that 'exists' then what exactly is it?

 

 We use language for a variety of things.

We can greet people, give orders, ask questions, describe the world, etc.

Describing the world is the language we use for science and it is this mode of language that metaphysics is also based on. Everything that we describe is matter and/or motion - material.

Immaterial means not material.

As Todangst has argued, 'immaterial things' are not even defined within the discourse of description, so if I am going to be putting forward a concept that isn't material then it will have to be of a different discourse other than describing and our mental concepts will need a different purpose rather than to describe the world that we live in.

 

 Although we do sometimes use mental concepts to try and describe 'how we are' to another person, this doesn't mean that they descriptions in the same sense as the ones of physical object. E.g. I can describe a table in terms of objective properties like height and colour but with an experience I have to try and work out where my friend might've experienced something similar.

 

  Why do we make such descriptions of our mind to friends?
A common purpose is to explain our actions or to discuss future or hypothetical actions. So we could say that the concepts of mind serve a social purpose, to regulate and make sense of our behaviour.
We use it to explain our actions to other people.

So mental concepts can have a coherent use without being 'things' that exist in the descriptive sense. This allows them to be 'immaterial'.

(I believe that mathematics are also 'immaterial&#39

 

 

 

One might try and give them a material existence the following way:

Premise 1) Mental concepts are applied in a material setting.
Premise 2) This means that they exist as concepts applied in a material setting.
Conclusion) Mental concepts have a material existence.

However, I disagree with premise 2 as it appears to misuse the word 'existence'.

So to summarise this first section:
1) I agreed that everything that exists is material and that if something was 'immaterial' then it would have to be a concept from a different use of language rather than to refer to a 'thing' that exists.

 
2) I gave an alternative use of language to world description, i.e. regulating and making sense of our actions, that would allow mental concepts to be coherent in a 'not material' way. i.e. immaterial.

 

) I suggested a possible argument that would claim that such concepts were still material, but I countered that such an argument depended on a misuse of what it was for something to be 'material'.

That leaves me with a coherent immaterial conception of mind

deludedgod wrote:

First of all, non-physical is inocoherent

No. Non-physical existence is incoherent.