D H budweiser.com> wrote:

Yes. And today, we have countless experiments that show the correlations
between mental activity and the physical world (sticking probes in our
brain and seeing the mental sensations they create). That's why so many of
us our materialists. But yet, we all still have private mental events
happening which don't correlate to other mental events in the domain we
learn to label as the physical world. We just never get the opportunity to
experience the correlation first hand, because the only physical events for
these types of mental events we call private thoughts only exist inside our
head.

If our brain was built different so that all brain activity was directly
correlated to external physical events, then we wouldn't have the power to
have private thoughts. Private thoughts are just the result of the neural
activity which is not directly correlated with external physical events.

For example, if the only time we could think about a dog, was when we were
seeing a dog, then there would be no confusion about the mind. It's the
simple fact that we can have thoughts about dogs, when there is no dog in
the environment, that creates the illusion of a non-physical mind. It's
the simple fact that we can see a dog foot-print and then have thoughts
about the dog that created it (a large black dog with floppy ears pops into
our thoughts) which creates the notion of a mind.

If we had a brain that could not create private thoughts, the entire
mind-body confusion never would have happened. We wouldn't be wasting any
time talking about the mind vs the brain because everyone would simply see
themselves as a physical body interacting with a physical environment and
nothing else. This stuff people like to call "conscious experience"
wouldn't exist because there would be no confusion over the "I" in "I am
having a conscious experience".

When people talk about the fact that they are having a conscious
experience, and that this is something odd which needs to be explained
(John posted some of his normal talk like that in this thread), it's
because they are confused about what the "I" is that is having the
experience. It doesn't feel to John that it's his physical body which is
having the experience. It feels to him (and to most people) as if it's
something separate from the body which having the experience. That's
because, when we say to ourselves, in our own private thought, "Gee, I
wonder what type of dog left those foot prints", we don't associate our
mental perception of our own words with our own physical body. Those words
seemed to have come out of no where. There is nothing physical in our
environment that we are able to correlate with the production of those
words. Science has uncovered the fact that it's brain behavior creating
those thoughts, but just because that's what it says in a book doesn't mean
most of us have any first hand experience of the physical correlates of
those private thoughts. As a result, all these private thoughts we have in
our "mind" seem to exist separate from the body.

It's easy to understand that there's a link between the mind and the
physical world since the mind is responding to things that happen in the
physical world and that events in the mind later effect the physical world
(Out of my mind comes the words: "I think I'll raise my hand" and then my
hand moves). But seeing there is a link, doesn't allow us to see that it's
the same thing. I can control a car, but I am not a car just because I can
control the car. And likewise, just because the mind can interact with the
physical world is no proof that the mind and the brain are the same thing.

People love to argue (and it's already happened in this thread) that the
mind is "created by" the brain. They pull the magic word emergence out of
their ass to justify this argument. Why do they feel the need to make such
an argument if the mind is not in fact created by the brain, but is in
fact, _the brain_.

When we move our hand, do we feel the need to make the argument that the
motion has emerged from the hand, and that motion is not the hand, but
instead, something created by the hand through the magic of emergence? Of
course not. It's just the hand moving. We don't have any illusion that
something which wasn't there before the hand moved has now been created by
emergence.

But if materialism is correct, then all this activity we sense happening in
our brain which we call private thoughts, is nothing more than the motion
of the physical parts of the brain. So why, when the brain moves, do we
feel the need to talk as if something new has been created in the world
which is something other than just the brain? Why, is the entire concept
of the mind body problem, and the concept of consciousness, still such a
mystery to all these people like John and Alpha, who are otherwise strict
materialists who have spent a lot of their free time exploring these
concepts?

Why does John keep saying, things like (I'm quoting from his message in
this same thread): "You dismiss what might be an interesting question, what
is the physical basis of a conscious experience."

John "knows" he is having this thing he calls "a conscious experience" but
he can't for the life of him figure out how a physical brain could create
such an experience despite the fact I've given him a perfectly workable
explanation a good 20 times here in c.a.p.

He doesn't see his own "conscious experience" as nothing more than the
motion of his brain. He believes something else has been created by the
brain. He calls the "something else", "conscious experience", but he can't
for the life of him, figure out what it is, or how it got there. He just
knows it's there.

But if materialism is correct, there is nothing else there other than the
motion of the brain. It's as if every time I moved my hand, he jumped up
and said:

Look, there it is, your conscious hand experience just showed up again.
Where did it come from? What is it? How is it possible that a hand
could create such a think?

And when I stop moving my hand, he says:

Look, your hand is unconscious. The conscious experience is gone. why
did it go away?

Then, when I tell him it's nothing more than my hand moving and there's
nothing else that needs to be explained, he reacts with:

You dismiss what might be an interesting question, what is
the physical basis of a conscious hand experience?

I dismiss nothing. I explained it. It's nothing more than the movement of
the hand.

John doesn't have any problem understanding that a hand in motion isn't
creating something new and mysterious. It's just a hand in motion. But he
can't accept the fact that his private thoughts are just brain motion, and
nothing more, even though he will try to make the argument that he's a
materialist, which is the believe that there is nothing else in this
universe except the motion of physical matter.

All this confusion, which we can see first hand right here in this thread
by reading the posts of John and Alpha, has to come from somewhere.
Neither of them are stupid, both of them are interested in ideas of AI and
the mysteries of the human brain and mind. But yet, both of them believe
there is something happening here, which hasn't been explained. And they
are not alone - they are right in sync with the majority of scientists
working in these areas.

Why do they all see hand motion, as something we all understand and nothing
special, but yet they see brain motion, as something so special we have to
give it special names like conscious experience, or mind, and talk about
the fact that no one has been able to explain why it exists?

It's because of what I wrote in the first post. It's because of how the
brain works at the most fundamental level to classify the sensory world
into separate objects. It uses temporal correlation of sensory events to
classify them and build it's internal models. When different sensory
events are temporally correlated, they get modeled by the brain as sharing
the same cause, and the end result is that we sense them as being one
object instead of two objects.

When I hear a car drive by and turn to see the car, I don't think of it as
two different objects (one which made the sound and one which I saw). I
sense it naturally as one object. But when I hear the siren of a police
car, and turn to see a bicycle pass by, my mind doesn't join the vision of
the bicycle with the sound as if it were the same object. From past
experience of hearing police cars and seeing bicycles, we don't have a
history of the two sensory patterns being correlated. They are not
predictive of each other. As such, the brain has modeled them as separate
objects in our universe. When we hear a siren, and see a bicycle at the
same time, our perception is that there are two objects currently in our
environment, the bicycle, and the think making the sound, which we know is
near by, but we can't currently see.

The brain builds its models of the world based on the temporal correlation
of sensory patterns. How different sensory patterns correlates is how it
is able to correctly parse sensory data into objects. And more important,
anything that correlates, becomes one object to us, and anything which
doesn't correlate, is parsed as two different objects.

At the highest level of the brain's classification network, it has created
for each of us the concept of "physical world" and "mental world". All the
sensory patterns which correlate to events outside the head (aka they are
caused by external physical objects, like dogs, and trees) get loosely
associated together as part of the physical domain. They are seen as
similar to one another based on their expected temporal correlations. But,
as the brain does it's mechanical job of building models of the environment
based on sensory data temporal correlations, it's never come across any
strong temporal correlations between all those objects it's modeled in the
physical world, and all those objects it's modeled in what we call the
mental world. As such, the brain builds for us, a classification we see as
the physical world, which is associated with all the sensory patterns that
can happen in what we all understand to be the physical world, and another
classification of the mental world, which are all the sensory patterns
which have little correlation to the physical world patterns.

We see the mental world as being a different thing, or a different object,
from the physical world, simply because that's the model our brain has
built for us. And it builds that model for us, because there are few
temporal correlations in all the mental world sensory patterns, and the
physical world sensory patterns.

When John sees my hand, or my hand moving, his brain classifies it as the
same thing either way because the two different sensory patterns are
temporally associated. He just doesn't see a still hand and a moving had
as being different things.

But when he sees a physical brain, (even if he could see his own physical
brain with the help of some surgery and a mirror) he would see no sensory
pattern correlations between that vision, and the thoughts he was having.
He might detect a little motion caused by the heart pumping and sense a
correlation between his heart pounding in his chest, and a slight pulsation
of the brain tissue. But there's nothing in that sensory data of a vision
of his own brain, to correlate with his mental thoughts.

As a result, there is no physical activity he can directly sense, to
correlate with his private thoughts, and as such, the brain parses the
sensory data as being two things, instead of one things.

So, because his brain has build sensory data classification networks which
classify all the events from the physical world as being not temporally
correlated with the sensory events from the internal mental world, John (as
well as just about everyone in the world), believes there are two things
that need to be explained, instead of one. There is not just a brain, there
is the brain, and there is the mind. So this is why he things there is
something else here (a different object, or different thing) that needs to
be explained. It's not just the brain, it's the brain, and this other
things created by the brain called conscious experience, which he things I
ignore, and which he things we should find an answer for. He wants to know
where this second thing that he calls conscious experience, comes from, and
how the operation of the brain creates it.

And though I've put forth this theory that the brain uses temporal
correlations in sensory data to build its sensory data parsing networks and
that the form of these networks explains how the data binding problem is
solved by the brain, and explains the basis for how the world is
objectified for us, and why everyone sees the mind as something separate
from the brain, he still things I've explained nothing. I've written at
least 20 long messages like this, addressing all his points, over and over
again, and still, he tells me he doesn't understand why he sees his own
conscious experience as being something different from his brain.

My theory about all this makes a nice little prediction. It predicts that
since these data parsing networks built by the brain are constantly being
re-trained based on experience, that if you simply exposure the brain to
sensory data which has temporal correlation between sensory events in our
physical domain, and sensory events in our mental domain, the brain will
re-wire itself to adjust for these correlations. It would stop classifying
them as unrelated, and start to build associations showing they are
correlated. After enough exposure to the output of a brain scanner, which
was injecting sensory data into your eyes, and ears, and even your touch,
in response to mental brain activity, the brain would build associations
linking them.

For example, lets say that playing with this new neuron level brain
scanner, you find a small groups of neurons somewhere in your brain (the
scanner would display a map you could zoom in and out of) so you would know
exactly where in your brain it was located), that showed a direct
correlation with the thought of "dog". Those neurons became active only
when you were thinking "dog", and every time you thought "dog" those
neurons became active. We then build a nice little 3D sculpture of that
neuron which is 6" in diameter, and we put lights in it and make it flash,
and little motor to make it vibrate and buzz each time it became active.
Then we wire this little device to the brain computer so that every time it
sensed your neuron activating, it made this thing light up, and and
vibrate, and buzz. We could make the intensity of the light, and the
strength of the vibration relative to the activity level of the small group
of neurons. Then, the subject gets to sit in from this thing, and see it
flash, and feel it vibrate, and hear it buzz. Any time he started to think
about dogs, it would activate. He could have fun flipping through a deck
of cards with pictures on them, and only when the dog showed up did it
activate - or, if for a second, he left his mind drift to the thoughts of
dogs, it would activate. It would be fun to play with. And the guy would
know it's not his actual neuron, but only this physical toy which is being
activated by the behavior of his neuron.

But, in the future, after that experience, every time he feels the thought
of dogs slip into his consciousness, he would also be thinking of that
vibrating and flashing and buzzing neuron model, and in turn, he would be
thinking of the fact that the cluster of neurons were firing in his head.
And from the map, he knows exactly where in his head that neuron cluster is
located, and he can even take his finger and roughly point it. With
training like that, the thought of "dogs" would in time, no longer seem
like some conscious experience which was separate from the brain. It would
be seen as the same thing, as the activity of that little neuron cluster in
his brain. The brain would no longer classify them as two unrelated
things, it would associated them as being the same thing. With enough
training like that, anyone's brain would adjust its model of sensory
reality to show that the brain, and the mind, were not two different
things, but were instead one thing. We would see each different conscious
experience we have, as different parts of the brain in motion. We should
stop talking about, and understanding, the mind as something different, and
we would just think of as the brain. The end result, the mind body problem
is solved, and the mystery of consciousness, is no longer a mystery.

Some of us, already understand this based on our power to reason about the
way it must all work. I'm so convinced that this idea is valid, that I've
already been able to condition myself to see myself not as a mind existing
in a body, but simply as body. I've eliminated the mind/body split from my
own self image of myself. It took a few years to really condition myself
to see myself that way, but now the split is gone. I'm just a body
interacting with the environment, and my mental activity is just the
movement of microscopic and atomic brain parts.

Most people however are unable to be convinced by logic alone. They sense
their own mind is separate from their own brain, and being told it's
separate because of a lack of temporal correlation in the sensory data just
doesn't do anything for them. When they sense that a cookie is separate
from the table it's sitting on they don't see that as the result of some
type of processing happening in the brain, they sense that it's separate
because they believe that's the way it is in the real world and they are
just seeing the world for what it is. They however, have never tried to
program a computer to analyze video data and correctly parse it into
objects, and they don't understand how hard it is to correctly parse a
visual scene into objects like our brain does for us without us having to
think about how it hap panes. So not understanding anything of this
problem the brain solves for us, they don't appreciate the idea that the
brain does, at times, parse things incorrectly, simply because it hasn't
been exposed to all the data it needs to see the truth. It's the fact that
under normal conditions, we can't sense the inner working of our own brain
with our external physical sensors, that causes the brain to make this
mistake.

But, if we had this sort of high resolution real time scanner that people
could play with to explore the inner working of their own brain in real
time, then this illusion of a mind/brain split, would vanish for them.
Anyone that was told the illusion would vanish for them if they played with
the device, and then experienced first hand, how the illusion vanished,
would then be able to understand the argument I've made in these posts.

Some people like John and Alpha seem to fail to understand my point, and
somehow think my ideas have explained nothing, and that I'm just pretending
that conscious is not real. They couldn't have failed to understand my
point any more. Conscious is real, but it's just an illusion created by
the brain building an invalid model of the universe for us. It's the
illusion that our mind is separate from the brain, that causes everyone to
work so hard to find some magic, like emergence, to explain how the mind is
created as as separate object in the universe from the brain. Their error
is believing that that just because they perceive the mind as separate from
the brain, it must actually be separate. They fail to even grasp the
possibility that it's just an illusion, and that in the physical world,
there is no split. The mind and brain are one and the same thing, so there
is nothing to explain about how the mind "emerges" from the brain. There
are not two things there to explain, there is only one. Emergence happens
in the brains percpetion of things, not in the physical world.

When we take a pile of toothpicks, and arrange them to spell out a word,
like DOG, we say that the word DOG just emerged from the toothpicks. But it
didn't actuall emerge from the toothpicks. The concept of DOG doesn't
exist in the toothpicks. If someone who doesn't read English was watching
the toothpicks they wouldn't see the concept of a four legged pet emerge
from the toothpicks. It exists in our brain's perception of the
toothpicks. It exists because the DOG neurons in our brain, which were
inactive at one moment, suddenly became active once the toothpicks were
moved into the right configuration. What emerged, was again, the movement
of parts of the brain - brain behavior, not toothpick pile behavior.

When mind seems to emerge from brain, it's not because something is
happening in the world to make a "mind" emerge. It's because the way the
brain represents its own self image, is naturally a dualistic model of a
physical body (and brain) along side a mental self we call the mind (and
used to call things like soul before we rejected the soul and tried to
pretend we didn't believe in dualism when we still actually did).

Yes, that's true. But I think it's because the more you are guided by a
"show me" mentality and the less you are a rationalist guided by the
rational logic you can create with language, the less likely you are to
accept the rational argument as truth. Rational arguments only sound
valid, if they confirm what you see with your own eyes. The majority of
people in the world today don't seem to accept the simple rational argument
of materialism. Or they only accept it to a point, and are then left with
the need for someone to explain to them why conscious experience exists in
the universe. The answer is that it doesn't exist in the universe, it
exists in their own brain's faulty model of the universe. But before they
can accept that it's just an illusion created by their own brain, I think
we have to show them first hand how it works by making their own brain,
change it's model. And the simple way to do that, is to allow them to
experience fist hand, in real time, to a high resolution, the operation of
their own brain. John can't accept (or it seems, even understand) the
rational argument, becuase it doesn't fit with what he "sees" with his own
"eyes".

I've tried to explain the rational logical argument to John for a few years
now, in many long posts like this (for those of you not reading from
c.a.p). But after all my writing, he still doesn't have a clue what I'm
talking about. Either I'm just a very bad writer (probably some truth to
that), or he's just never going to accept the rational view of the argument
and will never understand it until I can show him what happens to his own
view of reality, after being exposed to an experiment that allows him to
experience first hand, the internal operation of his own brain (aka mind).

Enough exposure to that would force his own mental model of reality to flip
making a light bulb go off as it happened, and at some point, he will look
back and wonder just what it was he was having such a hard time
understanding. But without the ability to show people this effect first
hand, they will keep thinking that conscious experience is a mystery in the
universe which no one has been able to explain.

How many Schizophrenic people accept a rational argument that their
illusions are not real? My understanding is the very few are able to
understand that what they experience is just an illusion created by a
faulty brain - even when everyone they trust is telling them it's an
illusion. Understanding the illusion of the main/brain split is exactly
the same problem, except with this illusion, the majority of people in the
world - even some of the most educated - argue it's not an illusion. How
do you fix a world full of people that are suffering from
schizophrenic-like illusions about the mind being something created by the
brain, instead of understanding it IS the brain they are talking about? A
real time interactive high resolution brain scanner is just the tool I
think we need for the job.