[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by skidoo

No. I'll be charitable and posit that you're being willfully obtuse. If no other source is necessary to explain the TV program, if the DVD player hypothesis is sufficiently supported by the evidence, there's no reason to propose magical "broadcast signals."

Magical? It seems your paradigm is 'magical'! You cannot point to where consciousness is in the brain, where freewill choice is in the brain, where long term memories are located, where tacit memory is stored, how all this scattered, hiding information unifies to create a coherent sense of consciousness.

There is no working model of how unconscious brain processing can evolve via natural selection to produce the incredibly complex user illusion of consciousness. Nor choice from unconscious (i.e. no choice) responses surviving better. To believe this is occurring without evidence is 'magical' thinking IMHO.

You were the one claiming 'evidence' that materialism was true and dualism was 'slam dunked'. You gave no solid evidence, just displayed faith in Novella's super confident, unsound, opinions. Just like religious people sometimes display super confidence as an act of faith in their belief. Well it isn't scepticism, scepticism means to doubt.

You've been given the evidence about 900 times already, yet you refuse to acknowledge it. There's nothing more I can do.

What I have been given over the years is incredibly confident statements from skeptics who read one side of the debate, usually from a half baked, biased source like on 'skeptics dictionary', they can't be bothered to read the original sources or other side of the debate... thereby maintaining a passionate, misplaced sense of confidence in one's viewpoint.

There is ZERO evidence for telepathy or remote viewing. Zero.

More misplaced confidence from reading biased sources. As Radin points out after over a 1000 controlled lab based trials into psi, the accumulated odds against chance is around 10^104 to 1 (*after taking in account the skeptics claims of file drawer effects , etc.) There is no sound argument to reduce this to chance level, unless you wish to invent a conspiracy theory to explain it away.

Just as the fact that we can't explain every single detail of evolution doesn't support creationism.

How many times do I need to tell you aren't arguing with a creationist. If you want to do so to win an argument, I can perhaps provide links to one

Yes. Clearly. If the brain creates mind, then a broken brain breaks the mind, etc. But you seem unwilling to read.

So you are claiming again that breaking a TV set must destroy the external transmission. Or that a broken car unable to move breaks the driver inside.

Stroke victims who lose language do not report losing clarity of consciousness they report it feels like being in a machine that doesn't work. You may observe this as brain damage but they do not feel they lose the will or clarity to try and communicate they just feel they lose the ability to communicate through words. There is a difference between thinking and expressing it in words. As Professor of Neurology, Antonio Damasio puts it after studying case after case of stroke victims 'In every instance I know, patients with major language impairments remain awake, attentive and can behave purposefully' In other words how do strokes just damage these people in the same way? It also places a big question mark over those who think that sense of consciousness is associated with language.

One's claims are supported by ever increasing mountains of evidence, the other is not supported by any evidence.

So you still refuse to offer evidence that matches your degree of confidence?

There are many claims made by the materialist hypothesis that are falsifiable, as I've already stated repeatedly. This is ridiculous.

None of these falsified the brain as a filter of consciousness, interactive dualism or even idealism, give me something specific that you would accept falsifies your model that the brain creates the mind.

Bullcrap. This is not a strawman. It's an analogy, illustrating your argument from ignorance. You say, "Well, science can't explain EVERY detail of consciousness

Can it explain ANY detail of consciousness?

therefore the proper hypothesis is the dualist hypothesis," just as the creationists say, "Well, science can't explain EVERY detail of evolution, therefore the proper hypothesis is creationism."

Who cares what creationists are arguing. Evolution is not owned by physicalists, you seem to have taken a Physicalist's Evolution VS All Else stance. It is true Darwin didn't support creationism but he didn't think evolution was 100% blind either that belief came later from Neo-Darwinism. Darwin co-discovered Natural Selection with dualist Alfred Russel Wallace who delayed publishing out of respect for Darwin. (Wallace believe it or not also later claimed he had evidence of survival of brain death. ) . In other words your 'default' position isn't a default position, it is a physicalist's reinterpretation, filing in gaps with a theory that the correct miraculous series of random errors somehow survives better and creates unnecessary things to survival like incredibly complex consciousness, .... all from unconscious, blind, random mutations.

I don't share your confidence that Neo-Darwinism is the correct interpretation of evolution, I'd rather leave the gaps open to future evidence than play numberless dot to dot.

As Novella pointed out re Egnor, you argue just like a creationist, refusing to acknowledge the evidence.

Confidence is not evidence, it is sometimes called faith.