Make Up Yer Mind, Already! Hemispheres and Souls

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@DomainRider

I was responding to the suggestion that “ that the mind is a thinking machine that can transcend the laws of cause and effect. ”

I had the same response. For subjects such as ourselves to look to understand ourselves as thinking machines is way too mechanistic for my liking. I think it is interesting to wonder at what makes beings such as ourselves possible but imaging that as a kind of neuronal/chemical Rube Goldberg feels wrong to me.

[DomainRider]

@MarkD

@DomainRider

I was responding to the suggestion that “ that the mind is a thinking machine that can transcend the laws of cause and effect. ”

I had the same response. For subjects such as ourselves to look to understand ourselves as thinking machines is way too mechanistic for my liking. I think it is interesting to wonder at what makes beings such as ourselves possible but imaging that as a kind of neuronal/chemical Rube Goldberg feels wrong to me.

I have no problem accepting that we are thinking ‘machines’ - the advances in neuroscience of recent years and the accumulating information on the effects of various brain injuries put it beyond reasonable doubt for me.

But I think the use of words like ‘machine’ & ‘mechanistic’, that tend to conjure images of cogs, cams & levers, and oversimplistic analogies like ‘robot’, while they may be accurate in some sense, don’t do justice to the complexity and sophistication of biological learning systems.

My objection was to the suggestion that a ‘thinking machine’ could ‘transcend the laws of cause and effect’. Machines, mechanical or biological are dependent on cause and effect to function at all.

Quite what ‘transcending the laws of cause & effect’ would mean beyond injecting random noise and damaging logical operations, and how it could be useful, remains unclear.

[Relates (Roger A. Sawtelle)]

@DomainRider

Quite what ‘transcending the laws of cause & effect’ would mean beyond injecting random noise and damaging logical operations, and how it could be useful, remains unclear.

Cause and effect physics means that the same cause has the same effect. That is not true, when it comes to living things as you yourself have said. I say that it is because living thing can learn from experience, which is a form of thinking. I hope that this is useful, although it seems that humanity today is overthinking so it is failing learn from its mistakes.

[DomainRider]

@Relates

Cause and effect physics means that the same cause has the same effect. That is not true, when it comes to living things as you yourself have said. I say that it is because living thing can learn from experience, which is a form of thinking. I hope that this is useful, although it seems that humanity today is overthinking so it is failing learn from its mistakes.

The kind of cause & effect physics you’re talking about refers to fundamental (micro-level) interactions such as particle interactions. At macro-scales, cause-effect interactions are complex, involving billions of particles, so you never get exactly the same interaction - as Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”