iNow

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

No, especially since gene expression is environmentally dependent

We actually fill in and invent something like 90% of what we “see,” and your example of the dress confirms exactly that. We impose a best guess on the incoming stimuli based on context and expectation, based on our existing model of the world and the context available, and NOT based purely on precise things like frequency. Here’s a link to an extremely simple and accessible explanation and it serves to reinforce my point that these things are all differing intensities of self-created illusions. https://www.pbs.org/video/dress-excerpt-j7mm9z/ Yes, of course. It starts with the biochemistry and when that same biochemistry activates within the storytelling parts of our brains we THEN apply AFTER the fact arbitrary labels like “feel” and “reason” and “think” in an attempt to align it with our model of the world and communicate these ideas with others. Citation? You have this interesting habit of asserting things as absolute truths when they’re very clearly not.

This concept of a mind is just as much as a post-dictive narrative as freewill is, yet you treat it as something tangible. The mind is just as arbitrarily modeled as the idea of yellow is, but at least with yellow we can use tools to measure and confirm frequency. The mind however is just a concept, similar to love in this regard. Yellow is paradoxically more real. Please elaborate. The conception a mind comes directly from the operation of it, so it’s invalid to suggest any independence whatsoever, yet that’s precisely what you’ve done here.

Who said anything about not being able to have thoughts about anything at all? Are we reading the same thread? Please explain to me in what ways they’re different. Can you show me a picture of your mind? Maybe point to it on an fMRI?

This same logic applies equally to the concept of a mind. There isn’t such a thing as “a mind” in the world “out there.” The concept of a mind is all in your head. But again… what does this have to do with freewill?

It does more than just those. Those often happen too, but aren’t prerequisite

You have yet to establish that referents are prerequisite to having a mind, but it’s not any more on topic now than it was earlier.

You said a computer can’t have a mind bc it doesn’t have referents. Inherent in that claim is that referents are required for a mind. That’s plainly false. This is all still off topic too

You’ve misrepresented the definition you shared. The mind is the complex of element processing in an individual, but the referents being processed there are not prerequisite to having a mind as you seem to be suggesting. The mind exists even in the absence of external referents (like those you cite). This all off topic in a thread about freewill though

Your own link refutes your claim

This is non-sequitur and mistakenly asserts that referents are required to meet some arbitrary definition of mind. They are actually fixable. Just need to train it on a different data set and feed new more representative data into the model.