SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
Another Non sequitur! We were talking about percentages!
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
So are decimals, but we weren't talking about decimals either were we?
Moonwood the Hare wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2019 7:08 pm
I really don't think I should be having to explain junior school level Maths to you. However. Fraction is the more general term that includes both decimal fractions and percentages among other things; this means if you are talking about percentages you are necessarily talking about fractions but you are not necessarily talking about decimals. Think of it as a Venn diagram with fractions as a big circle with decimals and percentages sitting inside it.
You are committing a non sequitur when you introduce a new term after speaking about the original term, fractions. It went like this. I said:
You are saying that a person can be 100% male and 100% human without any contradiction, which doesn't align with a teapot that is 100% steel and 100% porcelain. You are trying to say that something like a cat being 100% animal and 100% feline is the same as something that is made of two entirely different materials, but is still 100% of each.
You said:
No I never said the nature of either God or man were things that could be measured as fractions.
Fractions aren't exactly the same as percentages nor decimals. It's like I said You are saying that a person can be
half male and
half human without any contradiction, which doesn't align with a teapot that is
half steel and
half porcelain. You are trying to say that something like a cat being
half animal and
half feline is the same as something that is made of two entirely different materials, but is still
half of each. Then you saying:
No I never said the nature of either God or man were things that could be measured as decimals. The flow of the conversation doesn't follow when you introduce a new term to describe something that was previously said. A non sequitur is a conclusion or reply that doesn't follow logically from the previous statement.
Moonwood, you should know by now that a mind is a description of a brain's processes via neurons and synapses.
Incorrect. From Wiki:
To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.
Moonwood the Hare wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:13 pm
It certainly should become clear to you but I doubt it will. The phenomena in question are a set of behaviours, including verbal behaviours, and if these behaviours are present we say there is a mind. We do not say the presence of a functioning physical brain is symptomatic of mind in the same way, rather we may hypothesise that the brain is the cause of the mind by observing these behaviours in relation with brain functioning.
You can describe the brain's processes all you like and you will not be describing mind.
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
Then all you have to do is show how a mind can exist without a brain.
No. This is an irrelevance. Whatever mind is and whether it is caused by brain or not we do not know about mind because we observe brain or brain processes, rather we observe a specific set of behaviours. Cartesians would say we infer mind from those behaviours, I would follow Kenny (who is following Anscomb and Wittgenstein) and say those behaviours are symptomatic of mind i.e something we observe performing these functions is something which has a mind.
Anthony Kenny uses the following example: suppose after you die we were to cut open your skull and find no brain inside, nothing but sawdust; would we then conclude you had never had a mind?
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
No, but you could easily say that the brain is missing and therefore the mind is also missing.
We most certainly could not. Suppose I scan your head and the scanner finds no brain bit only sawdust and yet you are talking to me, explaining your intentions, making inferences; what would it mean in that context to say that because there was no brain there was no mind?
Of course not. We may posit that the brain causes mind, though you are completely mistaken in thinking this has been proved or anything like proved, but if we want to describe those things that are symptomatic of mind we will describe a set of behaviours not a physical brain.
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
This can be proven and has been proven. We know that when we remove different parts of the brain, the person belonging to the brain loses some amount of functionality from that area of the brain. If we keep on removing areas, we keep on losing functionality to the extent where there remains nothing left at all. How would a mind that relies upon a brain (that ends up having no functionality) return to full functionality?
You are confusing correlation with causality. If materialism is true then presumably if you could reassemble the brain exactly as it was the last time it had functionality then it would return to functionality. If you could reproduce that structure in some other compatible medium presumably that would restore full functionality.
It's not a THING that works independently of the brain. We know this from what we have discovered in brain surgery and what happens to the brain with drug usage. Your mind doesn't take up any space because it isn't a physical object, it's a process.
No, we really don't. In fact one of the earliest brain surgeons became a duelist because of what he discovered in experimenting on the brain.
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
Really? Who was that? Name me one neurologist who has written any peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain. In fact name me ANYONE who has and you may have a valid point.
Wilder Penfield. He engaged in what is called point stimulation, that is stimulating part of the brain to produce a response. He stated out as a strict materialist and he thought that if he stimulated the brain so that the fingers moved the person would think they were moving their fingers. Instead he found people saying things like 'my fingers moved but I didn't move them, you did.' So he shifted from materialism to Cartesian dualism. I don't know what his views on the mind surviving death were; that was not his concern.
It must have been at one point.From Wiki:
Penfield devoted much of his thinking to mental processes, including contemplation of whether there was any scientific basis for the existence of the human soul.
He was heavily indoctrinated into Christianity. Where's his peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain?
You are conflating two distinct issues: mind/body dualism and the mind surviving death. You can believe the mind survives death without being a dualist and you can be a dualist without believing in survival. On the mind surviving death without dualism you need to look at some of the work the omega point theorists came up with in the nineties. As I recall at one omega point conference Kenny and Tippler persuaded Flew that a copy of the subatomic structure of a body at the point of death would in effect be a resurrection of the person. Omega point theory has now been falsified but it lead to some interesting albeit bizarre discussion.
Well, give me an example of something else that is both material and immaterial and how it is possible to combine them.
Justice.
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
How is justice material?
If you accept a materialist worldview how can anything not be material? But justice is expressed through matter, so if we are to share resources fairly then what we will be sharing will be material and we will look at the material objects and their distribution
That's a stretch!
That is not how definition works. If you want to answer the question of how a word is being used in a specific context you don't do that by listing twenty definitions from twenty different contexts.
SEG wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:47 am
No, but you can choose several different definitions of a word and not one of them particularly would be necessarily the correct one in all circumstances.
Absolutely. But if you want to say which one is correct in a particular context you need to indicate that not just give a list. I am not sure I can do much more than keep repeating myself in the hope you will understand.
Yes, the Gnostics talk about Jesus donning a cloak of flesh, but they never thought he was a man at all.
I think you will find they did think he was a man in the sense that was important to them. But yes, a lot of gnostics were docestists; they thought Jesus did not have a real human body but only something that appeared to be a human body. Later you find people saying Jesus did have a real human body but his mind or spirit was replaced by the logos or divine mind. The orthodox position is that he had a complete human nature, body, mind, spirit etc.
But the earliest sources say he was an angel without a material body.
Premise One: If a compassionate God exists, then he would do things just as a compassionate person would.
Premise Two: God doesn't do things as a compassionate person would.
Conclusion: Therefore, a compassionate God does not exist.