Koch might wish to consider William James’s neglected theory of consciousness: the brain does not create the mind; it focuses it.
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Materialism in neuroscience is not a finding, it is a tenet. It does not need to be true. It simply needs to be enforced.
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The debate in Krakow, Poland, sponsored by education foundation Fundacja En Arche is now available, with translation, at YouTube.
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The messy processes of the brain that enable the various layers of consciousness bear no relationship to what happens in computers.
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We’ve heard countless times that bigger brains evolved to allow for higher intelligence in our hominid ancestors – but not any more.
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It’s supposed to be a given that machines or brain organoids might be conscious despite not knowing what that is or how it works — but preborn children can’t be…
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Part of the reason we don’t know exactly how anesthesia works is surely that we do not know what consciousness is (there are at least 325 theories out there).
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Neurologist Brian Edlow hopes that brain–computer interface technology like Neuralink will help researchers communicate with covertly conscious people.
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Where exactly is a popular song located? It lives in memory, human and recorded, in many forms. But it occupies no spatial location.
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Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agrees; the image of storing and erasing memories is popular due to computer technology but not relevant to memory.
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Neuroplasticity is a very interesting and important area of research. But the careless and casual attribution of unexpected mental states to it is junk science.
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Unfortunately, some of them spend a lot of time trying to discredit people who are willing to look at these questions.
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The simpler explanation, he says, is that percepts, perceptions travel through axons. Conceptions don’t travel through axons because they’re not material.
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A misguided article in Popular Mechanics gave neurosurgeon Michael Egnor a chance to shed light on a unique fact about people with split brains here.
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People are entitled to their own definitions of materialism, of course. But once we focus on a standard one, we see that it is false to the reality of the human mind.
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Serious research on terminal lucidity will immensely damage the sort of materialism that Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker champions.
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Shermer told Mind Matters News after the event that he would bump up his credence in the existence of souls from 1% to 2% out of 99%.
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He sees words like “mind” and “soul” as just linguistic placeholders until we have a fully material explanation for how we function.
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Egnor thinks that the strongest evidence that the mind is not merely the brain comes from epilepsy and split brain research.
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Egnor says there is massive evidence that the mind is not simply what the brain does but Shermer insists that it is all unexplained natural phenomena.
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