According to the new dualism, mind and brain are not completely independent substances, and yet they are still quite different and distinct. We have physical neurons and electrochemical activity as well as conscious mental experiences going on within our brains.
A superfluid state can be very different from the helium atoms that collectively interact to produce the state, but we don't then conclude that superfluids are not real or physical. — Uber
They have accepted an irrational, unrealistic, absurd, and poisonous ideology that simply does not correspond to reality.
It's the mind that makes categories, not the brain — George Cobau
To truly understand how the brain produces conscious experience, it will take a whole new theory and paradigm shift on the order of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.
The basis for this general knowledge is empirical, rooted in the results of modern neuroscience and modern physics. So the details still need to be finished, but the general idea is already there: consciousness is an emergent physical state. — Uber
It's true that correlation does not prove causation, but I believe that, given the evidence, the most likely explanation by far is that the brain causes conscious experience. — George Cobau
Yes, there are different levels of abstraction (that appears to be the point that Uber was making) but the difference between brain and mind is certainly more than this. — George Cobau
Also, I don't believe that the mind is an epiphenomenon...
I don't think that the mind is spiritual. I believe that mental aspects and conscious experiences are a natural result of evolution. — George Cobau
One of the greatest neuroscientists of our time, Antonio Damasio, holds the view that consciousness is an emergent state. The following article from MIT gives a quick rundown of his theories. — Uber
Contemporary neuroscience has established a fundamental correlation between brain function and mental activity; the data support the basic monistic premise that human emotional and intellectual life is dependent on neuronal operations. This monistic perspective is associated with a philosophy of materialism.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1994) is noted for his critique of Descartes's separation of mind and body, which he refers to as a significant "error" thay has misled many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. Noe (2010) is also clear that the last 25 years have led a growing number of neuroscientists to abandon the Cartesian dualism of mind and body for an "embodied, situated approach to mind" in which we are "dynamically coupled with the world, not separate from it." Rand and Llardi echo the same conclusion: "To the degree that a scientist subscribes to the still widespread Western belief in mind-body dualism...his or her ability to investigate the relationship between mental events and brain events may be compromised."
Although modern neuroscience has rejected dualism, it still has to account for how cognitive representations and processes can affect bodily states.
For centuries we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacity transcends our bodily nature. In this traditional view, our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and above all, able to directly fit and represent the world.
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I was brought up to think about the mind, language, and the world in this way. And I was there in the mid-1970s when the revolution started. Some philosophers...had already begun taking issue with the traditional view of the mind. They argued that our bodies have everything to do with our minds. Our brains evolved to allow our bodies to function in the world, and it is that embodied engagement with the world, the physical, social, and intellectual world, that makes our concepts and language meaningful. And on the back of this insight, the Embodiment Revolution began.
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It started out with empirical research carried out mostly by analytical cognitive linguists who discovered general principles governing massive amounts of data. Certain computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers slowly began taking the embodiment of mind seriously by the 1980s. But by the mid-1990s, computational neural modelers and especially experimental psychologists picked up on the embodied cognition research -- brilliant experimenters like Ray Gibbs, Larry Barsalou, Rolf Zwaan, Art Glenberg, Stephen Kosslyn, Martha Farah, Lera Boroditsky, Teenie Matlock, Daniel Cassanto [and many more]...They have experimentally shown the reality of embodied cognition beyond a doubt. Thought is carried out in the brain by the same neural structures that govern vision, action, and emotion. Language is made meaningful via the sensory-motor and emotional systems, which define goals and imagine, recognize, and carry out actions. Now, at the beginning of the twenty first century, the evidence is in. The ballgame is over. The mind is embodied.
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