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Highest

Can mind be reduced to matter?

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So the question is how can inert matter (the brain) create something like the mind which is the ground for intelligence and reason. Does the mind simply precede matter? Basically those who think so believe that non-reason (matter) cannot produce reason, it's inert and have no rational potentials, aka the principle of proportionate causality. ''If something doesn't a) have the quality, b) is unable to get that quality, or c) unable to make that quality then obviously it can't be said to cause that quality.''

What do you think and why? 

Edited by Highest

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I don't have any problem with inert matter being able to receive input, calculate, determine outputs, and send those outputs out as actions to other physical objects - hell, that's exactly what is happening in my phone as I write this! 

The thing that did it in for me was: where is this conscious experience happening? Because I know it is happening. I know sensations exist. It's about all I know. Conventional wisdom would have us accept that this is the result of the actions of a brain's input-output process. Ok. Where?  Really, ask yourself,  where does this conscious experience take place? It's not 'in the brain', because what happens in the brain is electro-chemical synaptic firing. And that's not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing white and black and hearing speech and so on.  So then I have to ask, does the brain somehow create an extra, non-physical dimension? Because that's the only way the "brain generates consciousness" argument can work: each brain manages to generate an entirely new non-physical sensory dimension, and oh yeah we have no suggestion at all that this is the case. We have to not look at this because it starts not making sense very damn fast. 

Of course the other option is that this sensory dimension always existed, just waiting for the moment that this precise brain was created to plug into it. Or maybe it's a time-share with other brains from history, so maybe it plugged into a dinosaur once, and then a bacterium, then a fish. But it was pretty damn clever of the universe to create the precise number of non-physical sensory dimensions it would need to accommodate every single brain and other sentient process through all of existence, just so that physical experience could be experienced as consciousness... which, I might point out, there is NO rationale for in the physical model. Why is consciousness necessary in a physical universe? The processes should work just as well without it, shouldn't they, if consciousness is a byproduct?

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Everything can be reduced, but you can't tell the limit of everything

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5 hours ago, Highest said:

What do you think and why? 

There is no difference between matter being intelligent and you seeing it as intelligent.
Is matter governed by laws of cause and effect and obeys physical, mechanical rules?
Or does matter simply move intelligently and you are simply trying to explain its movements with made-up mythologies?


Bearing with the conditioned in gentleness, fording the river with resolution, not neglecting what is distant, not regarding one's companions; thus one may manage to walk in the middle. H11L2

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