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Originally Posted by Open Mind This is close to non falsifiability. Yes, if you probe the brain and you find a memory triggered, tell me how would you decide a thought was not in the brain by such a method? |
By finding the origin of the thought somewhere else. The people who think that thoughts originate from somewhere else have to come up with
positive evidence for their hypothesis.
If the existence of a thing is indistinguishable from its nonexistence, we say that thing does not exist.
---Yahzi
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Incidentally, which is your favoured NDE explanation?
(1) People hallucination they are dying before they have died
(2) The electrically dead brain hallucinates more vividly than normal dreams
(3) People hallucinate they are dying when coming back to life.
(4) Agnostics, atheists, skeptics and infant children invent those after narrowly escaping death?
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What sort of NDE are you referring to? The fancy flashes, tunnels of light, and so forth? I suspect that's just the brain playing tricks when deprived of oxygen and other nutrients.
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So you are telling me an animal not correctly remembering or mixing up the location of food is 'no significant disadvantage'? If we have the capacity to remember accurately, why did the capacity to remember wrongly survive? If things only need to work 'well enough for survival'? in that case why did the materialists idea of a 'user illusion' of consciousness evolve at all?
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It's of no significant disadvantage if it does not happen too often. Note that false memories rarely include disremembering where the pasta in your pantry is. We don't have the capacity to remember accurately, only well enough.
The illusion of consciousness evolved so that the illusion of will could evolve. The reason the illusion of will is so useful is that it causes me to decide that I have control over my actions. That, in turn, causes me to plan future actions, particularly by thinking of possible dangers and how to avoid them before they occur. It is quite useful to believe that I can respond to stimuli of my own free will, because then I develop intelligent responses.
~~ Paul