apeiron said:
I can see you're rather worked up. But it would help if you focused on the question rather than making random slurs.
This thread has strayed into plain crankology once people start citing EM fields as being the putative cause of consciousness. And you are making a fool of yourself for supporting this nonsense.
As I said, saying the mind is composed of its electrical fields is as vacuous as saying it is composed of its atoms. There is zilch evidence that the brain is a loom designed to weave electrical patterns that are then somehow, magically, conscious.
Do you see the way you're arguing? You're relying extremely on pathos. You've been shown wrong over the last several posts and now you want to change the subject to get the focus back. The focus isn't even about a theory of consciousness, it's about mental causation.
All of the arguments you lost were in trying to attack the EM theory on the basis of their premises being true (to which your counter was that it was silly or ridiculous, which adds no value to your argument) and you were wrong.
It's not my theory (I don't have one) but it's a viable reductionist theory. This is a philosophy forum, we can only see whether an argument is valid, not sound (
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=39367).
I only have access to understanding reductionist-type theories given my background in physics, but I'm also a pluralist (I see no reason to think that a systems approach should conflict with a reductionist approach, just because of how we label them, for instance).
In fact, I think a helpful and useful systems approach should be proven in the limit of the reduced theory. (I.e. QM reduces to classical physics in the limit, and to chemistry as well, chemistry and physics make up biology, astronomy (classical physics) and chemistry make up the geology, biology and geology make the ecosystem and of course:
biology + chemistry + physics --> neuroscience
(in the future)
neuroscience --> psychology
(this is not some strict hierarchy, it's meant mostly as an example)
My argument on mental causation is that the sense of "me" that we feel is an illusion brought on by a combination of systems that have found a sustainable energy balance (following the laws of physics)
The first time this happened was with single-celled organisms. Cells are amazing things little machines. The cell, one day takes in another kind of cell, but instead of completely digesting it, it forms a symbiotic relationship with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory
(this is a valid theory that has suggestive evidence, but some objections. Note that the objections don't invalidate it.)
Now the cell has adopted the other cell as its organelle and is now a more complex system (really a set of two subsystems).
I posted the article about the slime mold in which, a colony of single-celled organisms form a multi-cellular organism for a task, then break apart back into single-celled organisms.
In this way you can see how the more cells involved, the more complex the system becomes. Now we can talk about organs (made up of cells) such as the brain. (Of course, consciousness could very well exist everywhere in the body too, for all I know).
Either way, the conclusion that you arrive at from the reductionist view is that the phenomena of consciousness is the effect that arises from the human body, of who's components are the cause.
The qualia of consciousness are not true representations of reality, but stereotypes laid by a sophisticated categorization system (a network of neurons in your brain, for instance) that uses these stereotypes to predict (within a tolerable accuracy) how the world around him is behaving, or will be behaving sometime in the future. It's not always accurate, but it does a lot for the survivability of its species.
We're only made individuals by the concept of the boundary layer between our organs and the environment (another helpful category). Even that boundary is somewhat loose; we mix with our environment in many ways. We depend on many cultures of bacteria that we would die without (namely, the ones in our digestive system). We're pretty much a bunch of interacting molecules that have stabilized a pattern of mass and energy given the environment and the rules of the universe.
aside:
There's also the matter of the nucleus of each cell to consider. They contain your base DNA. In some respect, they have a lot of say in how you respond to the environment, especially holding the DNA code that has allowed your strain to survive all these years.
As an aside, it would be an interesting argument that consciousness somehow arose from your cells, as a long-term process, that utilizes your brain in the short term and that consciousness is somehow linked with your DNA.
