What Descartes means when saying "I think therefore I am" is: I am conscious of my own thoughts, and thus I cannot doubt my own existence." A computer cannot reason as such because it is not aware of itself.

As for the idea that brains are "mechanical" (as determined as clockwork), it is a bit counter-intuitive, and there is no evidence for it that I am aware of.

But their software is also ‘mechanical’ in that it is totally deterministic and unable to reform itself. No spreadsheet ever told me: “I’m tired with mathematics, I want to do poetry instead!”

A lot of thinking goes on unconsciously. — Bitter Crank

And yet, when people act mechanically and end up making a mistake they often say: “sorry, I wasn’t thinking”, as pointed by forgottenticket.

Can you think without holding some information in memory over a period of time? — Harry Hindu

No, and that's what I am saying. Without some reflexivity, it's not true thinking, it's just mechanical. A true thinker can challenge his/her own thoughts, re-examine them for instance, connect them with other thoughts, etc. To do that s/he needs to remember these thoughts and be aware of them.

It's all a matter of definition. You can chose whichever you'd like of course but for me your definition is too broad. Life too can be defined as some sort of information processing, as it's all coded in DNA. Is life the same concept as thinking? I don't think so.

Processing information. — Harry Hindu

... and knowing that you do. Otherwise a computer can think.

Some animals think, to a limited extent. They too grapple a bit with the reality presented to them. Granted, it's not high level, but it's an activity that developed before we became sentient. — Bitter Crank

Nobody can tell if animals are self-aware or not but I would think the ones nearest to us philogenetically probably have some form of consciousness.

How would you solve the problem? — David Mo

I would venture that the two minds, though originally identical, have lived since the botched dematerialization through different experiences on different planetary systems, met different folks, fell in love with different females of different species, all of which made them two different minds nowaday.

I suppose there may be other forms of materialism / naturalism that do not rule out the emergence of complex, new phenomena at higher levels of organisation, not necessarily predetermined and regimented by quarks... Life, human agency, the world of ideas and all that. It’s emerging, growing, evolving in non-linear, non-predictable ways. It can’t be reduced to a bunch of quarks shaking their ass up.

the OP understands reductionism as materialist reductionism, and that people generally mean by the term. That’s certainly how I use it.

Oh I know what they mean: an amalgamation of El, Yahweh, Jesus, the Holy Ghost and what else... Like a guy who would have read the Three Musketeers a bit too fast, and would think that Aramis, Portos, Athos, d’Artagnan and Richelieu are all one and the same.

to criticize of reductionism is to have an issue with what explanations are — TheMadFool

Not really. It is to criticize the traditional materialist conceptual toolbox for explaining things as being made of just one single tool. It’s not enough to explain this world.

You can maintain that A is in some sense reducible to B without denying the reality and causal efficacy of A. — SophistiCat

If A has causal efficacy, why can’t something from level A affect something from level B?

Wiki:
Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, mainly in France and Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when structural linguistics were facing serious challenges from thinkers and philosophers such as Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.

Have you read Laszlo? — Pantagruel

Nope. Checked his Wikipedia entry and I'm interested. I like this idea of "a field of information as the substance of the cosmos", the "Akashic field". That's very close to my thinking.

I remain fundamentally a realist as well as a lazy person so I might not buy into all the psychedelics, but I like the idea of a quantum mind as well. This is something I have been playing with, because I found that the quantum wave-particle duality looks strangely similar to my concept of mind-body duality* and to its underlying idea of a matter-information duality as being the stuff this universe is made of (which itself resemble the "Akashic field"?).


* aka mind-brain duality, however the brain is but a part of our nervous system so I prefer "mind-body" - the term "mind-nervous system duality" would be the most precise but it's too long.

More to system thinking and structuralism.

Though there are many gods in the Bible: El, Yahweh and Jesus' pop in particular, who are very different. It's a mistake to amalgamate them into one guy as most people do, an artifact.

And many others also, eg the gods of Egypt are mentioned in the Bible, as well as others. They are just not the gods of the Hebrews. But they play their part.

Why rule out other options? Like two or three gods, or one-and-a-half god? Pi gods, anyone?

It's what I call naive materialism. The belief in the primacy of "matter" (whatever that means) over anything else. But as we have known since what? Aristotle?, matter always comes in some form. There's no such thing as formless matter. Even pure chaos is a sort of form. And one cannot really conceive of a 'pure' form not encased in some material support (though Plato tried). Therefore matter and information are joined at the conceptual hip: you can't have one without the other.

In a less naive form of materialism, Descartes dualism should be reformed into the fundamental duality or ying-yang relationship between matter and information (understood as the infinite shapes and forms that matter can take and 'support'), two sides of the same coin.

I think Saussure's idea of negative differences between concepts and their absence of clear-cut ontological value is fundamental to understand natural languages. Concepts are relational, the meaning is at the level of the network between concepts more so than inside each concept taken in isolation.

"You can't push against nothing."
Exactly. The same law of action-reaction applies to the mind-body problem. The body has an evident impact on the mind. Thus it follows that the mind must have some impact on the body, like when I ask you to raise your arm and you do it: that's symbolic language having a material impact. So the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon contradicts the laws of physics.

It's been more than two months for me now (Italy).

The fundamental error of reductionism is to believe that that 'small things' (e.g. atoms) always and totally determine big things (e.g. human beings), in a one-way street. But since "to all action a reaction", it stands to reason that, IF the small can have an effect on the big, then the big can have an effect on the small...

It's not a matter of vulgarity, because "annoyed"is not vulgar. The fact that you are annoyed is a psychological fact, a fact about you as a person, not about religion as an institution. If you want to phrase it philosophically it would be more like "Is religion on the whole positive or negative for mankind?" Something speaking more to the universal than to your own mental state.