Looking at the brain page

[Lewis]

Not something newly available, but i only just stumbled across it.

Number 3 in the Stanton Lectures from the University of Cambridge in 2011 -- "Looking at the brain":

Video & Audio: Lecture 3: Looking at the brain - Metadata

It's worthwhile listening as raising some important doubts about some of the rather unscrupulously hasty thinking in "Neurophilosophy" and "Evolutionary Psychology" -- which can be found, among other places, in this movement.

The lecturer also gives some interesting reasons for doubting that a casual invoking of quantum mechanics has any bearing on what we mean by human freedom, which, he suggests, is rather linked to notions of responsibility than indeterminism. Again this is possibly of interest here, vague gestures in the direction of quantum mechanics being not unknown in certain quarters within the movement.

[peril]

Kruse's invocations of quantum mechanics and special relativity are just nonsense. I've no doubt that one field of science may inform another, but first you have to understand both

[Cryptocode]

I'm unsure what you want to discuss, but the topic interests me.

Today the general field of Psychology and Neuroscience is well along the road to 'proving' (certainly believing and trying to prove) that the mind is nothing more that the 'electron field' produced by chemical actions of the brain. The brain is ALL there is.

The two largest dissenters that I've found are
1. the physiologists and athletes who reply that, 'then the brain must be distributed thoughout the body, and
2. the religions who reply that no, the mind is the cause of the actions of the brain.

As one wholy educated in the physical sciences I am very sure that I know how a car works and the causes for which it works. But I will never know the motive for which it works. This is because that motive is provided by the human driving the car. Science may someday in the future be able to explain completely how the universe works and still be completely unable to explain the motive which initiates and maintains that working.

The neurophysicists and brain sciencists unfortunately have been completely unable to date to find or explain consciousness, much less self-consciousness. I'd guess that all life is conscious to some degree of the world about them. Perhaps some animals are self-conscious, and most humans are. To be conscious of the world around you depends entirely upon the sense organs that transmit the information to which one becomes aware. All the sense organs themselves interpret and alter that information with the purpose of conformance to the minds' previous understanding, beliefs, opinions, or conparable information. If the mind has absolutely no information comparable to any degree, the information is not accepted.

Self-consciousness is then the consciousness that 'I' and aware of myself as seperate from that world of which I and conscious. Further it's possible that I'm also aware that I additionally alter that consciousness of my senses in the process of relating it to myself.

Therefore it's entirely possible, to me anyway, that the ultimate explanation of how the universe works bears no relation to why (motive) or how I work.