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I think the problem goes at least as far back as Plato and the allegory of the cave. Plato spread this concept that there was a difference between the body and

I think the problem goes at least as far back as Plato and the allegory of the cave. Plato spread this concept that there was a difference between the body and mind or soul, and Western culture has never really recovered from the stupidity of that idea. There's really no evidence or justification for it. Your mind and your body are the same thing.

darkerside 7y ago
Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. This is like someone people never fully recover from adolescence. Correct, it forms an integral part of who you eventually become.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. So were lots of bad ideas. Science is a process of trial and error. This was an error. The hope is that you correct the errors, not make them an integral part of your belief system.
ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? I’m sure there plenty more such notions outside the West.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. I don't think it is. Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evidence for that". Then hundreds of thousands of people read what that person said, and then decide to propagate the idea by saying it themselves, still without any evidence. You're claiming that at some point, the bulk of literature means we can't say it's a stupid idea any more? I disagree. Ideas are determined valid by the evidence or lack of evidence, not by how popular they are. In fact, when a stupid idea is popular, that's when it causes the most damage. So when there's a bulk of literature propagating a stupid idea, that's the time when it's important to say that it's a stupid idea. > Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? You'll note I didn't say it was restricted to Western culture. I think Plato has a large part in spreading the idea in Western culture, but I'd guess he wasn't the first, and other people probably came up with the same idea independently.
  - ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
    What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? No, I don't mean that just because Plato said it cannot be "stupid", but you have clearly provoked the crowd bringing philosophy to the fore, and broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything, as it precisely challenges anything deemed certain. Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      > What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? I'll sidestep this by saying that for my purposes, reality is just a theorized model of what our senses perceive. If we don't trust our senses, then it's possible none of the things we perceive exist, but who cares? The things we perceive as our brain and body can be modeled to predict what we will perceive in the future. > broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything That's not how I define philosophy, but I won't get into a semantic argument about what philosophy is. I also think saying things are "certain" is almost always a mistake. All I'll say is that if that if you define philosophy as eschewing evidence, then I'm happy to dismiss all of what you consider philosophy. If you aren't able to produce evidence (empirical or logical) for the statements you make, then all you're doing is stringing together words into grammatically-correct but meaningless sentences, which is not a skill I care about by itself. I'm happy to say that I don't think all philosophers share your view that evidence is unnecessary, so there are many people who I would respect who I would also call philosophers. > Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, I don't think we can assume that. Nor should we. Nor is there any value in doing so. Let's temporarily assume the opposite: let's assume our senses are lying to us. If that's so, I'd argue that our senses lie to us in consistent, predictable manners. I can predict how my senses will lie to me in the future based on how they are lying to me now, and how they have lied to me in the past. If I choose to tell my fake body to let go of a fake ball, my senses will lie to me and tell me that the fake ball falls toward the fake earth. Every fake morning, my senses lie to me and tell me that the fake sun rises. How would my situation differ if all this were real? If I really dropped a real ball and it really fell toward the real earth, would that be different? If a real sun rose in the real morning, how would that change my experience? In short, a falsehood so complete that it is completely indistinguishable from the truth is not meaningfully different from the truth. If I put my hand on a hot stove and sense pain, does it matter whether that pain is real or fake? I don't think it does. > if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul. That's true, which is why minds and souls should be relegated to the fiction section of the bookstore, with ghosts, werewolves, elves, and all the other fictional things we don't sense with our senses. I'm not saying these things aren't fun to think about, they just shouldn't be considered as existent phenomena on which we base our beliefs and decisions.
fit2rule 7y ago
Metabolism. How the chemistry of your body interacts with itself. I know for sure I have 'episodes' when I've got acid in the wrong parts of the gut. I also 'feel' the stages of stool composition, and there are definitely relics of unhealthy eating in my mood swings. One thing though, is I never take pharmaceuticals, as I wish my body to be a picture of my life balance, which I believe are two separate realms completely (body/life). Instead I do everything I can to eat well, and give my body the sport it needs. This isn't easy, but everyone's got their own body, and its own needs. If you pay attention, it'll tell you what it needs. The brain, or at least my brain, is a nice soft spongy joystick for controlling the rest of it. It feels good to throw around a bit, but you gotta take care of what its attached to, as well. A good day in the surf is how I charge my mind up, anyhoo...
jotm 7y ago
I believe the mind, or soul, is indeed in the brain. But it's also separate. It's more like software controlling the hardware. Take self control and attention. How many people struggle with it, procrastinating? You want to do something, you know you have to do it, you like doing it... But you don't. Because your brain doesn't listen to your mind. Because the brain is mostly a primitive autonomous system and needs to be constantly motivated, coerced, trained to do things that it technically doesn't need to (why do anything besides eat, survive, reproduce?) Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes. Yes, that's correct, and I really don't understand what you think you've said that proves otherwise.
- lanstin 7y ago
  I think the battle in procrastination is not between the brain and something outside but between different parts of the brain, one favoring a long term perspective and others favoring immediate gratification.
koheripbal 7y ago
Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness. How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you. The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave". This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively. Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I would caution you on ever thinking that allegories or analogies "demonstrate" anything. Analogies can be used to explain a model of a system, but they can't be use to prove that that model is accurate. Consider the analogy "arms are like wings". That's actually true in a lot of ways, but we can't simply assume that arms have all the properties of wings by analogy, otherwise we'd conclude that arms allow us to fly. That education improves our capabilities is fairly well proven via other means.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Are you saying that two thousand years of nominalism vs. realism are based on a misunderstanding of Plato? (And, doesn't sun worship predate philosophy by a good bit?)
aldoushuxley001 7y ago
> Your mind and your body are the same thing. That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding. The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-perceptions (like colours, smells, sounds, etc), emotions, etc. Which is to say that the mind is composed of material that is fundamentally different from the brain. Of course they’re highly correlated but they are in fact separate entities composed of different materials. You may say that the fundamental materials of the mind are reducible to the same things as the brain, but that would be confusing correlation for the thing itself. Take for example the colour red, which is present in the mind but not the brain. Yes the brain enables the perception of red but it is not red itself. Eg a photon with a wavelength of approximately 620-750nm is often confused for red but in fact it’s just a photon which, when it hits the back of our eyes causes a chemical cascade from the relevant cone cells. So it’s abundantly clear this photon in itself is not red because it just causes a specific chemical cascade at back of our eyes. So is this chemical cascade red? No it’s just a chemical cascade that is highly correlated with red appearing in our mind. The right answer, I believe, is simply that red is highly correlated with specific pathways of chemical cascades in our brain. The point remains that the brain and the mind are separate and distinct entities made up of qualitatively different material. If you disagree with this assessment, please tell me what is red?
- mcguire 7y ago
  "The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain." ... in roughly the same way that a process is not a processor. Or a program, for that matter.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Okay, if you're saying that the mind is just the sequence of events occurring inside the brain, I certainly won't argue that the sequence of events doesn't exist. However, I don't think that's what most people mean when they say "mind", and using the word "mind" brings with it a lot of baggage, so I'd prefer to use a more descriptive term, like "sequence of events".
dr_dshiv 7y ago
I like reading ignorant things like this because it helps show why we really need more classical education in society. If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. It's just so damn good for thinking with. But prior to Plato, the Pythagorean Philolaus wrote that sensation/experience comes from the interaction between the soul (greek: psyche) and the body. Soul, here, is not the experiencing thing but the immaterial forms. (Summary: an example of an immaterial form is the concept of a triangle — a real and meaningful form but separate from any material instance). This Pythagorean view of the soul is compelling and has similarities with the idea of computational logic being fundamentally separable from the media of computation. The same logic can run on silicon or some water pump computer. So, from this, if mind is what we'd call the experience, then it isn't just the body. It is the material body interacting with the soul (the "computational" forms).
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. I guess that means you're shocked.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    You mean you've read some Plato? That's great. I'm most inspired by Phaedo, Gorgias and Timaeus. I think it's really important to stay attuned to the Pythagorean tradition, which seemed to be Plato's largest philosophical influence.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      I've read The Republic. There wasn't anything in there that inspired me to read more of his work. I think Plato and a lot of other early writers should be studied as historical figures, but we should also recognize that they were products of their time. Plato got it wrong more often than he got it right, not because he was stupid (he wasn't), but because he didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against. But we do have that benefit, and we should use it. We have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of 21st century giants, and we miss that opportunity if we choose to stand on the shoulders of philosophers in the infancy of philosophy. Even where ancient philosophers got things right in their theories of the mind, it was mostly just lucky guesses, without the benefit of modern neuroscience to validate those guesses. And neuroscience itself is in its infancy: our theory of the mind should be expanding every day as new discoveries are made.
seisvelas 7y ago
My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of? The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths. Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.
- lanstin 7y ago
  Google embodied cognition - while it is true semantics can be separated from the physicality of the incarnation of the system for simple software things, it seems likely any digital representation of the mind will include a lot of data about the material facts of wet brains, chemicals, diffusion, weird coincidences between same gene pathways affecting multiple systems and all.
- netwanderer3 7y ago
  I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history. It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago

darkerside 7y ago

Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. This is like someone people never fully recover from adolescence. Correct, it forms an integral part of who you eventually become.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> Modern philosophical thought and religion were built on that idea, and they were arguably inextricable from science in it's early stages. So were lots of bad ideas. Science is a process of trial and error. This was an error. The hope is that you correct the errors, not make them an integral part of your belief system.

ezequiel-garzon 7y ago

Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? I’m sure there plenty more such notions outside the West.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. I don't think it is. Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evidence for that". Then hundreds of thousands of people read what that person said, and then decide to propagate the idea by saying it themselves, still without any evidence. You're claiming that at some point, the bulk of literature means we can't say it's a stupid idea any more? I disagree. Ideas are determined valid by the evidence or lack of evidence, not by how popular they are. In fact, when a stupid idea is popular, that's when it causes the most damage. So when there's a bulk of literature propagating a stupid idea, that's the time when it's important to say that it's a stupid idea. > Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? You'll note I didn't say it was restricted to Western culture. I think Plato has a large part in spreading the idea in Western culture, but I'd guess he wasn't the first, and other people probably came up with the same idea independently.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
  What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? No, I don't mean that just because Plato said it cannot be "stupid", but you have clearly provoked the crowd bringing philosophy to the fore, and broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything, as it precisely challenges anything deemed certain. Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? I'll sidestep this by saying that for my purposes, reality is just a theorized model of what our senses perceive. If we don't trust our senses, then it's possible none of the things we perceive exist, but who cares? The things we perceive as our brain and body can be modeled to predict what we will perceive in the future. > broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything That's not how I define philosophy, but I won't get into a semantic argument about what philosophy is. I also think saying things are "certain" is almost always a mistake. All I'll say is that if that if you define philosophy as eschewing evidence, then I'm happy to dismiss all of what you consider philosophy. If you aren't able to produce evidence (empirical or logical) for the statements you make, then all you're doing is stringing together words into grammatically-correct but meaningless sentences, which is not a skill I care about by itself. I'm happy to say that I don't think all philosophers share your view that evidence is unnecessary, so there are many people who I would respect who I would also call philosophers. > Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, I don't think we can assume that. Nor should we. Nor is there any value in doing so. Let's temporarily assume the opposite: let's assume our senses are lying to us. If that's so, I'd argue that our senses lie to us in consistent, predictable manners. I can predict how my senses will lie to me in the future based on how they are lying to me now, and how they have lied to me in the past. If I choose to tell my fake body to let go of a fake ball, my senses will lie to me and tell me that the fake ball falls toward the fake earth. Every fake morning, my senses lie to me and tell me that the fake sun rises. How would my situation differ if all this were real? If I really dropped a real ball and it really fell toward the real earth, would that be different? If a real sun rose in the real morning, how would that change my experience? In short, a falsehood so complete that it is completely indistinguishable from the truth is not meaningfully different from the truth. If I put my hand on a hot stove and sense pain, does it matter whether that pain is real or fake? I don't think it does. > if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul. That's true, which is why minds and souls should be relegated to the fiction section of the bookstore, with ghosts, werewolves, elves, and all the other fictional things we don't sense with our senses. I'm not saying these things aren't fun to think about, they just shouldn't be considered as existent phenomena on which we base our beliefs and decisions.

fit2rule 7y ago

Metabolism. How the chemistry of your body interacts with itself. I know for sure I have 'episodes' when I've got acid in the wrong parts of the gut. I also 'feel' the stages of stool composition, and there are definitely relics of unhealthy eating in my mood swings. One thing though, is I never take pharmaceuticals, as I wish my body to be a picture of my life balance, which I believe are two separate realms completely (body/life). Instead I do everything I can to eat well, and give my body the sport it needs. This isn't easy, but everyone's got their own body, and its own needs. If you pay attention, it'll tell you what it needs. The brain, or at least my brain, is a nice soft spongy joystick for controlling the rest of it. It feels good to throw around a bit, but you gotta take care of what its attached to, as well. A good day in the surf is how I charge my mind up, anyhoo...

jotm 7y ago

I believe the mind, or soul, is indeed in the brain. But it's also separate. It's more like software controlling the hardware. Take self control and attention. How many people struggle with it, procrastinating? You want to do something, you know you have to do it, you like doing it... But you don't. Because your brain doesn't listen to your mind. Because the brain is mostly a primitive autonomous system and needs to be constantly motivated, coerced, trained to do things that it technically doesn't need to (why do anything besides eat, survive, reproduce?) Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> Take away what we call the mind/soul, and we're just a basic animal, running reactively on instinct and reflexes. Yes, that's correct, and I really don't understand what you think you've said that proves otherwise.
lanstin 7y ago
I think the battle in procrastination is not between the brain and something outside but between different parts of the brain, one favoring a long term perspective and others favoring immediate gratification.

koheripbal 7y ago

Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness. How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you. The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave". This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively. Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.

kerkeslager 7y ago
I would caution you on ever thinking that allegories or analogies "demonstrate" anything. Analogies can be used to explain a model of a system, but they can't be use to prove that that model is accurate. Consider the analogy "arms are like wings". That's actually true in a lot of ways, but we can't simply assume that arms have all the properties of wings by analogy, otherwise we'd conclude that arms allow us to fly. That education improves our capabilities is fairly well proven via other means.
mcguire 7y ago
Are you saying that two thousand years of nominalism vs. realism are based on a misunderstanding of Plato? (And, doesn't sun worship predate philosophy by a good bit?)

aldoushuxley001 7y ago

> Your mind and your body are the same thing. That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding. The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-perceptions (like colours, smells, sounds, etc), emotions, etc. Which is to say that the mind is composed of material that is fundamentally different from the brain. Of course they’re highly correlated but they are in fact separate entities composed of different materials. You may say that the fundamental materials of the mind are reducible to the same things as the brain, but that would be confusing correlation for the thing itself. Take for example the colour red, which is present in the mind but not the brain. Yes the brain enables the perception of red but it is not red itself. Eg a photon with a wavelength of approximately 620-750nm is often confused for red but in fact it’s just a photon which, when it hits the back of our eyes causes a chemical cascade from the relevant cone cells. So it’s abundantly clear this photon in itself is not red because it just causes a specific chemical cascade at back of our eyes. So is this chemical cascade red? No it’s just a chemical cascade that is highly correlated with red appearing in our mind. The right answer, I believe, is simply that red is highly correlated with specific pathways of chemical cascades in our brain. The point remains that the brain and the mind are separate and distinct entities made up of qualitatively different material. If you disagree with this assessment, please tell me what is red?

mcguire 7y ago
"The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain." ... in roughly the same way that a process is not a processor. Or a program, for that matter.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Okay, if you're saying that the mind is just the sequence of events occurring inside the brain, I certainly won't argue that the sequence of events doesn't exist. However, I don't think that's what most people mean when they say "mind", and using the word "mind" brings with it a lot of baggage, so I'd prefer to use a more descriptive term, like "sequence of events".

dr_dshiv 7y ago

I like reading ignorant things like this because it helps show why we really need more classical education in society. If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. It's just so damn good for thinking with. But prior to Plato, the Pythagorean Philolaus wrote that sensation/experience comes from the interaction between the soul (greek: psyche) and the body. Soul, here, is not the experiencing thing but the immaterial forms. (Summary: an example of an immaterial form is the concept of a triangle — a real and meaningful form but separate from any material instance). This Pythagorean view of the soul is compelling and has similarities with the idea of computational logic being fundamentally separable from the media of computation. The same logic can run on silicon or some water pump computer. So, from this, if mind is what we'd call the experience, then it isn't just the body. It is the material body interacting with the soul (the "computational" forms).

kerkeslager 7y ago
> If you'd actually read some Plato, as opposed to summaries, I'd be shocked if you could keep the same belief. I guess that means you're shocked.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  You mean you've read some Plato? That's great. I'm most inspired by Phaedo, Gorgias and Timaeus. I think it's really important to stay attuned to the Pythagorean tradition, which seemed to be Plato's largest philosophical influence.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    I've read The Republic. There wasn't anything in there that inspired me to read more of his work. I think Plato and a lot of other early writers should be studied as historical figures, but we should also recognize that they were products of their time. Plato got it wrong more often than he got it right, not because he was stupid (he wasn't), but because he didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against. But we do have that benefit, and we should use it. We have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of 21st century giants, and we miss that opportunity if we choose to stand on the shoulders of philosophers in the infancy of philosophy. Even where ancient philosophers got things right in their theories of the mind, it was mostly just lucky guesses, without the benefit of modern neuroscience to validate those guesses. And neuroscience itself is in its infancy: our theory of the mind should be expanding every day as new discoveries are made.

seisvelas 7y ago

My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of? The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths. Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.

lanstin 7y ago
Google embodied cognition - while it is true semantics can be separated from the physicality of the incarnation of the system for simple software things, it seems likely any digital representation of the mind will include a lot of data about the material facts of wet brains, chemicals, diffusion, weird coincidences between same gene pathways affecting multiple systems and all.
netwanderer3 7y ago
I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history. It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
- kerkeslager 7y ago