iNow

When you track how fast you're driving in your car down the highway, do you account for the backpressure applied to your windshield from the wing flap of a mosquito?

Depends on what you mean by meander

Relation to thread topic of free will seems even more tenuous now. I haven’t yet determined whether this was done on purpose

Humans haven’t even been around 3 hundred thousand years, and you’re taking 3 trillion with a T 🤣

All very interesting questions which I’m sure philosophers will spend another 3,000 years making absolutely zero progress answering

IMO, no. “Mind” is yet another arbitrary concept (or set of concepts) we try to force fit into the world in an attempt to explain our experiences and communicate with one another, but it’s a rough and often unuseful map/model of the what’s actually happening, AFAICT.

The same parts of your brain that write stories or make sense of the ones you’re reading. Maybe bicameral https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28612

AI plus fMRI = Some very cool things happening in this space. Here’s just one recent study among a great many in this field (and I haven’t even mentioned how pilots can control planes with their thoughts alone, or paraplegics can move their wheelchairs without moving!): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-can-re-create-what-you-see-from-a-brain-scan/?amp=true

Maybe, but consider: what is the “shape” of fresh cream mixing into coffee after being poured? We can describe it with Brownian motion and related equations, but saying it has a ”shape” IMO ignores the more important parts and also ignores how it’s ever changing. The mind is much more like that old saying that you can never walk through the same river twice than something which can be described using a metric like shape. Aka: A post-dictive narrative

That was clear. I’m still curious to better understand your intended point, unless you are unable or unwilling, of course.

Technically, it regarded you saying computers and robots couldn’t ever have minds because they lacked referents. I reminded you that referents weren’t prerequisite to having a mind. In some weird attempt to avoid updating your thinking, you then began arguing that the mind is unalterable and that thinking doesn’t change the way it functions. It very much does, regardless of how often you claim category errors are being made and how baffled you feel at “having to explain” this remedially false assertion. Agreed Yes. I understand that just bc people carry umbrellas when it rains doesn’t mean the umbrellas caused the rain. Did you have a particular point you were trying to make when sharing this correlation <> causation article? Definitely not. It’s how signals conduct and propagate across that shape which seem to matter far more.

Do you believe the operative process is unchangeable? Does that still apply when electrocuted? What about when infected with a virus that influences neural functions? Or maybe when in an accident and bleeding? How about just when it's receiving insufficient oxygen due to low blood glucose levels and the outer cortical functions slowly begin shutdown in an effort to focus all energy on autonomic components of the peripheral nervous system? All of these things quite obviously influence the operation of the mind. Trying to understand why you're placing this hard arbitrary wall where "the mind" is somehow not influenced by the environment in which it functions. It's not the stable category you keep suggesting it is. It's also not a category we see anywhere in the universe outside of our own minds. Everyone's minds very much are influenced by the conditions around it, conditions which change from moment to moment, conditions which alter its operations in measurable ways, and yet your position (while consistent) shows consistently an ignorance and obliviousness of the evidence available.

Indeed. You were wrong at least 5x (Unless you’re claiming there’s some unalterable feature of the universe called a “mind” that cannot be changed or altered and is rigid even in the face of new thoughts and inputs… maybe it’s just yours and you’re projecting perhaps?)

I edited the post bc I made an error. Your reply came during that edit. You were saying the mind doesn’t change just by thinking about it. It does and that is why I kept correcting you. Thinking about the mind changes the structure of it. Claiming otherwise isn’t sufficient to make this false just bc this is a thread in the philosophy folder https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/living-forward/202304/how-your-thinking-affects-your-brain-chemistry?amp https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/can-we-change-the-structure-of-our-brain-just-by-thinking-327017

Ah. Well good, then. You could’ve saved us a whole lot of time then if only you hadn’t continued asserting that the structure and nature of a functioning mind doesn’t change by the act of thinking about it.

Thinking about the mind changes the structure of it. This is my simple, and accurate, point that seem unable to accept. I’m very clear on my point, even though I understand you for various reasons believe otherwise.

The act of thinking changes the structure of the brain. The act of recalling memories rewires the brain and changes the memories being recalled. This happens with all thoughts and all emotions and all experiences. This has all been broadly understood for decades even though it seems philosophy and those engaging it often fail to keep up with the most current knowledge. What you’re doing is equivalent to arguing for the Bohr model of the atom.

Sounds like platitudes heard in places like Sunday school are being mindlessly repeated here

Unless a consequentialist view is taken whereby we accept that most decisions occur prior to any conscious awareness of them while continuing to enforce penal codes if it improves society as a whole. The existence of the consequence likely also alters the factors involved when making the decision itself, as neural plasticity and learning don’t exactly go away just bc decisions happen in the brain sooner than previously thought. The forecast of future consequences still can play a role in which decisions are made, even if we accept those occur due to biochemistry in specific locations.

Chemistry If you’d like to learn more about neuroscience, I can recommend a few good sites or just encourage some university courses, but your existing knowledge of how our minds function is clearly lacking and based on flawed assumptions.

Of course it is

It wasn’t an explosion, but the expansion and inflation of spacetime itself, and spacetime isn’t necessarily limited by the constraints of objects existing within it.

Humans will act in flawed ways regardless of how we’re organized and governed. Science is at least fine slaughtering sacred cows and finding fault with all ideas, amd the most famous of all scientists are those who falsify something we previously knew to be true. Only those ideas which survive experiment are kept, and even those only provisionally until something even more precise is discovered. We’ll always be biased and faulty as humans, but at least science provides a clear consistent method for minimizing those biases and faults and moving humanity forward. You seem to be under the delusion that researchers are well paid and that relativity is accepted on faith alone. We’ve seen such childish pig ignorant claims made many times in the past. You aren’t the first and won’t be the last to repeat that nonsense. I can only hope that you’re willing to challenge your own false beliefs and learn sometching new while you’re here seeking more ethical outcomes.

You seem to be arguing that our current thoughts cannot influence our future thoughts. That’s clearly nonsense.

Whatever makes your boat buoyant