Introducing the brain: interpreting research (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 06, 2021, 09:46 (1356 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: In every moment, your brain uses all its available information (your memory, your situation, the state of your body) to take guesses about what will happen in the next moment.

dhw: I don’t understand this. I don’t see how my attempts to work out, for instance, how life might have originated, or how evolution works, or why I forgot to buy a stir fry yesterday when I went shopping, entail a guess about what will happen in the next moment.

DAVID: I'll use a simple explanation, seeing patterns in clouds, Mickey Mouse, England/Scotland Island is the brain trying to help you, based on stored memories of patterns.

You are talking about the process of perception, in which we form “Gestalten”. This has nothing whatsoever to do with her claim that “in every moment the brain takes guesses about what will happen in the next moment”.

QUOTE: Every mental experience has physical causes, and physical changes in your body often have mental consequences...

dhw: It is a huge assumption to state that EVERY mental experience has physical causes (see below), though fair enough to say that physical changes often have mental effects. The author's following explanation is based solely on materialism. I am not advocating dualism or materialism - I simply can't follow her thinking.

dhw: ...what we call mental illness, as I understand it, can be triggered by changes in the metabolism, or it can itself trigger changes in the metabolism. It makes no difference whether you are a materialist or a dualist: for the materialist, a diseased, materially caused mind can trigger problems in the rest of the body, or the rest of the body can trigger problems in the materially caused mind. For the dualist, leave out the words “materially caused”. Both approaches “involve problems with the metabolism” – either as cause or as effect. Covid-19 may affect the metabolism and this may cause depression; lockdown may cause depression, and this may affect the metabolism. What has this got to do with materialism or Cartesian dualism? The effects are the same whichever -ism you subscribe to. And for good measure, how can she claim that, for instance, the depressing loneliness (mental experience) of a pensioner deprived of all social contact during lockdown has a "physical cause".

I am disappointed that you have completely ignored all of the above, as I’d have liked to know your own opinion on her view that EVERY mental experience has a physical cause, and whether you agree with my view of mental illness. Instead, you switched the subject to free will, which she doesn’t even touch on.

DAVID: The main reason I presented this is her view that he whole brain is at work at all times while much research is segmental and loses site of the totality of the working brain.

I made it clear in my post that I completely agreed with this section. It is her attempt to discredit the other two “myths” that I find confusing.

DAVID: I've not lost my dualism. One/soul can only work with the brain given, or its current changed state.

My response to her article was not an attack on your dualism but on the confusing nature of her arguments relating to the nature and causes of mental illness, plus her automatic dismissal of Cartesian dualism which, I have suggested, is irrelevant to her subject.