Physical viewpoints on the human mind bother me.

"@Yeller: I think that emotion comes from the soul and is then translated through the brain into the body, and that drugs are the opposite; as your brain is relaying information back to the soul, the drugs make a kink in the system. "

Except we know this is not the case, drugs create chemical imbalances which cause neurons to fire in an atypical manner, thereby producing varying effects on the body. We have an answer. Creating these unfounded 'hypotheses' is unproductive.

It's not 'presumptuous' or 'nihilistic' to identify what the brain is, it's realistic.

edited 9th Jan '11 11:32:52 AM by CommandoDude

My other signature is a Gundam.

Like what?

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

Let's imagine a universe wherein the mind exists only as an extension of the body-ala the brain. How would said universe be different from this universe?

Saying that the mind doesn't exist physically is, in fact, a metaphysical assertion, so no, it's really not that different from theological metaphysics.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Software on a computer doesn't exist physically - it's the result, the sum total, of a number of tiny electrical charges and so on in the hardware, but it's not the hardware itself. That's how I've always been taught the mind and brain work - the mind is a construct analysed by psychology while the brain is the hardware analysed by neurologists. If your ram goes bad, your software starts choking and dying, but you don't fix buggy software by altering the ram chips directly.

BTW, I'm a chick.

Unless you're lazy and the problem is poorly written software, so you just buy a whole lot more RAM to make up for the fact that the program eats it up at a frantic pace.

However, in reality, I don't think people are able to just buy a second brain to deal with all the overflow of crap they're dealing with.

edited 9th Jan '11 1:36:23 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Yami is mostly right, but I'd like to point out that technically software on a computer DOES exist physically and that you technically could go into a computer and see which physical phenomenon correspond to the OS, which correspond to Firefox, etc. It'd be quite pointless, but you could do it.

Of course, without the benefit of reading the memory directly all this would seem to be a maze of odd shifting bursts of current with little organization. Which is somewhere near where we are with the brain.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

The metaphor has a lot of holes, which is why we call it «wetware» instead.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Mind is an abstract concept, although not necessarily spiritual in nature. The computer analogy highlights the difference well: the Brain refers to the hardware while the Mind refer to the software. They are not independent to each other but they are two distinct concepts.

edited 9th Jan '11 6:13:30 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Well, in that sense, when you say that the mind "Exists" you are saying that there are such "things" as abstract objects. This itself is a fairly heavy philosophical statement.

The alternative is to say that the term "mind" is just a statement used to convey information-but it's not true that "mind" is an "object" with properties, so to speak.

I'm sure people smarter than me can explain WTF I'm talking about, and how it's totally irrelevant to the topic of discussion. Or isn't. Not sure. It just came to mind.

But they're not as distinct as hardware and software. The mind's function is deeply tied to the patterns in brain cells that is not analogous to the link between computer software and computer hardware. tl;dr, you can't reprogram a brain.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Yet.

Okay, let me rephrase that, you couldn't conceivably reprogram someone's mind entirely without drastic alteration to the brain's structure.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Well, yeah, but you couldn't reprogram an old punch card computer without changing the punch cards.

yes, but in the brain there are no metaphorical punch cards to switch out, is my point.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Well, what are anti-depressant medications?

edited 9th Jan '11 6:24:35 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Our current tools are a bit more crude than programming. I guess the analogy would be picking the punchcards where you think the bug is and flipping them upside down.

edited 9th Jan '11 6:35:11 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Or just removing the faulty cards.

edited 9th Jan '11 7:04:48 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Raising the impedance of the transistors or something. The analogy is dead at this point.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

There are no perfect analogies I'm afraid.

Hell, they're not even that good at using what they've got :V

^^Yes, but I'd like at least a useful one, with some basis in reality.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Some things just don't have any truly apt analogies that aren't themselves. I run into the same problem when discussing Digital Piracy-there's really nothing quite like intellectual property such that the differences don't make all the difference, so to speak.

The same is true with the Brain/Mind and anything else you could come close to.

That's not an excuse to use invalid analogies, however.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Then let's just not use analogies at all.