schizophretard...your just on a journey to find its location....

The mind is material. It is the cognitive expression of billions of neurons, tens of billions of glia, trillions of impulse transporting axons in circuits, circuits into programmes, and programmes into networks. Conscious activity is energy dependent which requires fuel, oxygen, and anaerobic with aerobic metabolism. Without any of those there is no consciousness and no thought.

The soul hypothesis

Primitive mankind as he/she began to think more and more, and observe the world around them, they had curiosity about how things worked. We still have that curiosity. They wanted to know how springs bubbled up, rivers flowed, volcanoes erupted, rain fell, and the Sun appeared to move across the sky. They wanted to know how we flexed and extended our hands, how we thought and talked.

Since they had no knowledge of chemistry, electricity, electrochemical circuits, they could not rely on a science thousands of years in the future.

They knew that "something" made the spring bubble, and the fingers flex. Something made us think, and when we dreamed, that something could even travel to other places and times. They felt that this something was independent in its action. You could not order it to do this or that. It did what "It wanted." They assumed it was conscious. They called these aethereal phantasms, spirits souls.

Spirits moved the springs to gush water. Spirits moved the clouds and made them rain. Obviously a spirit in our body made our arms move, our fingers flex, our legs walk. This spirit's consciousness must also be our consciousness. When we sleep, it can escape our bodies and go elsewhere. This spirit was responsible for all that we do, including thinking. When it permanently leaves our body that is death.

Now we know that all of the above can be explained on purely natural mechanisms. We know the pathways of consciousness in the brain. We know our on-off switch is the Ascending Reticular Activating System, which activates the diencephalon and the septal nuclei to make us alert and aware. Connections to the temporo-limbic lobe convey our emotions/affect, to primary sensory areas (visual, auditory, tactile) for perception, to association areas for identification and processing of those perceptions, to the pre-motor cortex to plan complex movements then to the motor cortex to activate the necessary muscles. Spect MRI and Axonal fibre mapping (Diffusion Tensor Imaging or DTI) has mapped thought patterns, speech patterns, and even emotional and mystical experiences in the brain. There is no work left over for the soul.

So the soul, which has essentially lost all meaning in human behaviour, is essential for one reason. That important reason is our delusional hope for immortality. We all want to live forever, but we know the body dies. So we can only be immortal if we have that ethereal something in us that outlasts the "mortal body."

This is why humans cling so tenaciously to the soul concept, immortality. And this leads the Bible being defended so savagely from criticism. It contains all of the excuses for believing in spirits, souls, and immortality. Some sceptical gomeral trying to destroy your immortality with logic is the greatest possible threat.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

The mind is material. It is the cognitive expression of billions of neurons, tens of billions of glia, trillions of impulse transporting axons in circuits, circuits into programmes, and programmes into networks. Conscious activity is energy dependent which requires fuel, oxygen, and anaerobic with aerobic metabolism. Without any of those there is no consciousness and no thought.

Functional imaging shows very distinct patters of circuits in the brain that occur in expressive speech, receptive speech, emotions of depression, emotions of anger, emotions of fear, emotions of love, alertness, perception, ideation, reason, intuition, decision, scepticism, and all thinking functions. These fMRI's do not show every neuron involved in the process but shows the major concentration and circuit regions that are quite recognisable to qualified Neuroscientists.

If you stop the saltatory electrical transmission in the brain by any means there is no thought, no consciousness, and no awareness. A good example is deep general anaesthesia done for surgery. I recall my past operation 15 years ago by thoracic and vascular surgeons. I recall the Anaesthesiologist putting the rubber mask on me, the smell of a strange gas, and told to count back from 10. I got to 6 or 5 and in an instant I felt a hose down my throat pushing air into and out of me. I wanted to scream but could not. I wanted to say, "Oi lads, I am not asleep yet, don't start yet." The nurse said, "Relax, ******, your surgery went well and you are waking up from anaesthesia. That was over 3 hours later. What I experienced was a second or less of time passage that was actually 3 hours and my chest opened my innards redesigned. My mind was a blank for that time.

Since then we have placed some volunteer humans (including me) under General Anaesthesia and performed fMRI and EEG's. My EEG flat lined. My brain looked inactive on fMRI with only maintenance metabolism occurring in a generalised homogeneous picture. Only when rescanned on awakening could we demonstrate the typical lighting up of the septal nuclei, frontal region, and brainstem ARAS. When I thought specific words, regions of my angular gyrus and Broca's expressive speech area lit up. When I thought about grasping with my right hand, a region of the precentral gyrus on the left lit up. When I actually moved my hand additional areas lit up in the basal ganglia, the motor association area, and tonic facilitatory and inhibitory regions of the brain stem lit up.

Everything we do occurs when regions and circuits of the brain increase energy and increase metabolism and specific neurochemical receptors.

In brain death, true brain death, fMRI shows no activity in the brain, not even baseline resting metabolism. Not a single case of true brain death by clinical criteria and/or imaging, has ever regained consciousness. Reports of people awaking from the dead, are of people who look superficially dead but are not brain dead. That is why cardiac arrest cases can be resuscitated. They did not die as many religious fundamentalists claim.

Since this is a religion forum, I will state my idea on Jesus' death and resurrection. Jesus’ did not really die (but was in coma) then he could have resurrected; or Jesus' really died. If he died his brain decomposed rapidly and by 38 hours when he supposedly resurrected, his brain was almost formless mush after swollen neurons have burst apart, and myelinated fibres have fragmented and partially dissolved. For Jesus to have resurrected from real death, it would require the most extraordinary magic to replace a hundred billion neurons, 10 times as many glia and Oligodendrocytes, a thousand billion fibres, and as many as 10 thousand billion synaptic receptors... and have all of the connections down to the exact cells which they were before the death. Or the resurrected Jesus was not the original Jesus, but at best he was an exact duplicate.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

Don't tease me!!! Show me where it is!!! I know you have it!!! Who sent you!!! Who sent You!!! It was the New World Order wasn't it?

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"I fully comprehended the power of the human mind at the exact moment I came to the realization that I'm totally insane and have no idea what I'm talking about."

I'm confused. The mind is material but it is also the cognitive expression of all those things going on in my brain. That doesn't make much sense to me. My material brain through all these processes produces my material mind that is a cognitive expression of this process. So, it sounds like you are saying that a material process is producing a material product in a similar way that material processes within my body produces blood. My body is material and my blood is material. So, you can physically remove my blood from my body. Why can't I do this with my mind? I should be able to physically separate my mind from my brain if it is material. Sure you could show me what is going on in my brain when I am thinking something but you can't physically show the thoughts. If I'm thinking about a flower you can't physically take the flower out of my head.

Everything you just described is about how the brain works but none of it touched on how the mind is material. The most you done is show that the mind is dependent on material processes. It could be said that the mind is an immaterial cognitive expression of the material mind and it would still fit with the function of the brain you just described.

I don't think what I'm saying really has much to do with an afterlife. At least not to me because I'm skeptical about the existence of an afterlife. Even if ,when my body dies, my mind dies with it then that still doesn't prove that it is material. It just proves that it is dependent on the material. Also, it works both ways. It could be said that the reason you believe yourself to be material is because you wish to be immortal and matter is immortal because it can't be created or destroyed.

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"I fully comprehended the power of the human mind at the exact moment I came to the realization that I'm totally insane and have no idea what I'm talking about."

shhh...shhh...you wanna blow my cover...i will decide if and when i will show or tell you where your mind is..in the meantime shh...

Think about it. We know with powerful evidence that I presented, that the brain generates all of our cognition. Either putting information together in expression or in receiving the data transmitted in writing or speech generated in the brains of other people. I am sorry you are confused by the technical details of my explanation. Reality is much more complex than the faerie tails of religious ideas. The mind is very material. When you watch a traffic accident on the telly, it is real and it is material. It is composed of electromagnetic waves carrying the coded images that will be converted into photons that reach your eye. You are not seeing the actual traffic accident but an electromagnetic signal converted and organised into photons that your brain can receive. All of your imaging of the distant traffic accident is matter and/or energy. When it reaches your brain it is configured by your material brain circuits into what your conscious brain images as the accident. I don't know if I can make it simpler than that.


You are correct in all but the last sentence. The mind is indeed material but it is only the product of billions of neurons in complex circuits and networks that are unified in deeper grey matter nuclei. Your mind is not your brain so much as an action of your brain. If you pitch a baseball to the catcher, your brain's complex circuits or mind controls what you are doing, the way you will throw the ball (what kind of pitch) and to whom you are going to throw the ball. But the ball is not your brain. It was hurled 90 feet (or is it 60 feet) from the action of your brain's mind activity and the sequence of muscles triggered into action. As you watch the ball travel to the catcher your brain's mind evaluates the trajectory. If it is too far outside, you know it or rather your mind knows it. Circuits in your brain's mind module says, "Oh ****." The Catcher's brain mind sees the ball deviating. His brain mind tells his body to lean to the right and shift his hands to the right to avoid missing the pitch.

Music is the pleasant sound of sound notes that your mind perceives as "Old Joe Clark". The song is not the fiddle producing the tune, or the individual strings, the rosin on the bow, the learned complex movements of both hands, the memory of the song's tune, or the sound resonance of the boddy of the fiddle. It is all of the above. The tune may not be thought of as material but it is. It is produced by the precise complex and sequenced actions of the fiddler , his fiddle and the fiddle body, the strings and motor action sequences of the musician.


You can separate the picture on your telly by pushing the off button on the controller. The telly then has a blank screen. If you separate the mind from the brain that really means stopping the brain circuits that generate the mind. That happens in general anaesthesia or real death.


You are playing a semantic game here. You say that the mind is dependent on material processes. I would agree. It is like saying a fiddle tune is dependent on the physical fiddle. OK, we are perhaps saying the same thing. I say that the fiddle tune is more than dependent on the fiddle and its parts plus the musician musical brain circuits. The tune is actually generated or produced by that combination of musician, arms and fingers, fiddle, bow, strings, precise motor movements directed by brain (or mind) processes. If you shoot the musician in the head 4 time with a .44 magnum, I guarantee you that the tune stops. When the brain dies, all consciousness and cognition stops. The brain stops temporarily under general anaesthesia. That does not include simple unconsciousness from fainting, seizures, or a concussion during which subcortical brain activity and brain stem functions persist.


I will die and cease to be a living human. I will not likely have an afterlife. I don't know that for certain but I see no evidence of an afterlife. Nobody who has clearly died (brain death) has ever come back to tell me. You are right in that my atoms composing my body will exist for billions of more years but probably not eternally. I think that sooner or later all atoms come apart. Some stable ones like Iron, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen may last longer than heavier atoms whose half-life is shorter.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

I understand everything you're saying but I'm still not convinced. Yes, my mind is an "action" of my brain but it isn't a material one. If it was it would be nothing but reflexes. There would be no "inner life". I would be nothing more than a robot.

The only reason you believe me to have a mind is because you have a mind. It is not because you can physically see it and experience it for yourself. If you were a robot and had no mind(inner life) and you studied humans. You wouldn't see any inner life. You would come to the conclusion that Humans are just biological robots. You wouldn't come to this conclusion thinking but by computation. You would come to the conclusion in a similar way that a calculator figures out that 2+2=4. Your "thinking" would be completely physical. You wouldn't be able to figure out that humans have minds because minds transcend the physical and all you are is physical.

Can you figure out if the atoms within a rock have some kind of primitive mind? I doubt you can because all you see is the physical and you are not a rock. So, you can't relate to a rock. A rock could have a material side to it and an immaterial side to it but you can only see the material side of the coin. What if all matter has an immaterial side to it and since the matter within our brains is organized in a complex way our immaterial minds are also organized in a complex way?

Matter can't be the only thing that exists. It doesn't explain everything. What kind of matter is a concept made of? What kind of matter is knowledge made of? What kind of matter are feelings made of? What kind of matter is consciousness made of?

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"I fully comprehended the power of the human mind at the exact moment I came to the realization that I'm totally insane and have no idea what I'm talking about."

I have to agree with you Schizo... I believe the brain is just the part of mind that connects us to the material world. There are alot of scientists who feel conscious is not determined by our physical brain. The truth is that the "problem of conscious" hasn't been solved.

As Eckhart Tolle says:

I know it hasn't yet been solved. I've also heard something before about how what you think also effects the brain. So, it goes both ways. The brain effects the mind and the mind effects the brain.

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"I fully comprehended the power of the human mind at the exact moment I came to the realization that I'm totally insane and have no idea what I'm talking about."