Consciousness; further review of current thought (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 06, 2016, 13:29 (2849 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: An essay in the NY Times looks at the latest thinking, with no results:
QUOTE: "…But we still can't explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain.
"This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said.-David's comment: I still look to quantum mechanics, dualism as shown by NDE's, as containing the most possible answers. We still have none.-Scientists who argue for materialism focus on the chemical and electrical workings of the brain in their search for an explanation. You look to a different approach in your desire to find evidence of dualism. However, you emulate the materialists whenever you discuss the actions of cellsavid's comment (under “Automatic breathing controls”): Note the brain produces chemical (hormonal) regulators as well as the resultant electrical signals, so we continue breathing without thinking about it.[…] This is all accomplished by automatic feedback loops. Again I suggest saltation.-Forget about Darwin's gradualism for a change, which we both reject, and ask how the saltations might have ORIGINATED, bearing in mind that the brain is a community of cells that communicates with other communities of cells. (Once a system is established, the cells should work automatically until new problems arise.) You presumably think it was either preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or God has dabbled. Same materialistic approach under “cell communication controls”AVID: Cells communicate with each other by chemicals on their surfaces that combine with each other, attract or repel:-That may be the means whereby they communicate (their equivalent of language), but the great question is how they formulate the messages which are to be communicated. Take it a few steps further up the evolutionary ladder to "slugs":
David's comment: It doesn't take any thought or evolution to be opportunistic, as another characteristic of living organisms.-Opportunism requires the ability to perceive the opportunity, to process the information arising out of the perception, to find ways of exploiting it, and to make the decision to exploit it. For me these are all elements of thought.
There is also an interesting quote in the wonderful “Butterflies” article (and thank you again for all these gems):-"To Conway Morris, to me, and to many others, it is striking how often evolution has produced the same solutions to the same problems in the same habitats with presumably the same selective pressures, starting with very different raw material.” -It is not evolution that produces solutions. It is individual living organisms. And for you, all these different living organisms must have been preprogrammed in the first cells 3.8 billion years ago or personally ”helped” by God to find the same solution, although his purpose was to produce homo sapiens. How much simpler it is to hypothesize that individual intelligences (perhaps designed by God) might spontaneously work out the same solutions to the same problems as and when they arise.