[skidoo]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Magical? It seems your paradigm is 'magical'! You cannot point to where consciousness is in the brain,

I can say definitively that if I destroy your brain, I destroy your consciousness. Of course, you'll say, "Oh, but it might live on in [insert unfalsifiable plane of existence here]."

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.

They're called neurons. Again, your same old argument from ignorance.

There is no working model of how unconscious brain processing can evolve via natural selection to produce the incredibly complex user illusion of consciousness.

So? We don't know exactly how evolution itself works.

Nor choice from unconscious (i.e. no choice) responses surviving better. To believe this is occurring without evidence is 'magical' thinking IMHO.

There is ample evidence that mind function depends on brain function.

You were the one claiming 'evidence' that materialism was true and dualism was 'slam dunked'.

I never said it 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.

No, skepticism does not mean "to doubt." You are wrong. In this context, we're talking about scientific skepticism, which is provisional belief, based on empirical evidence.

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.

Which is more likely?

A. Dean Radin (intentional chocolate?!) is full of crap.

B. Dean Radin is self-deluded.

C. Dean Radin's experiments are sloppy and imprecise.

D. The tiny positive effect he alleges is more correctly attributed to noise.

E. Radin is right, and he has proven there is some non-material aspect to our reality that has heretofore escaped the best efforts of some of the greatest scientific minds in history, but he still hasn't received a Nobel Prize?

Hmm. Which makes more sense to believe, based on the evidence? What have 100 years of research into psi given us? Zilch.

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.

How many times do I have to tell you that I'm making a perfectly legitimate analogy? One you have yet to refute. When you argue from ignorance, you're arguing like a creationist. "We don't know EVERY detail about consciousness and brain function, so there must be something to dualism!" is equivalent to "We don't know EVERY detail about evolution, so there must be something to creationism!"

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.

No, I'm clearly claiming that if there is no evidence for an external transmission, while in fact there is ample evidence that the TV program is coming from an internal DVD player, there is no reason to posit that there is an external transmission.

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.

So what? This is a straw man. Obviously the brain is a complex organ, and different structures in it control different cognitive and somatic functions. We've long known that if you manipulate certain regions of the brain, certain abilities are affected. Predictably affected.

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.

So what? A surgeon can literally go in and turn off your ability to speak without turning off your ability to think. But he can also go in and turn off your ability to think as well. Come on man, this is ridiculous.

There is a difference between thinking and expressing it in words.

No kidding.

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'

Duh. Any one of the many of us who have relatives or friends who've suffered brain damage (be it from stroke or whatever) can attest to the persistence of different levels of cognition, often pre-stroke levels. Some people even become savants after suffering brain damage, albeit usually at the expense of some other function.

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.

Language has nothing to do with speech. Nevertheless, this is yet another straw man.

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

I haven't refused any request for evidence. I've given it REPEATEDLY.

None of these (e.g. development of the brain correlates with development of the mind, etc.) falsified the brain as a filter of consciousness,

Do you realize what you're saying? I never asserted that any of the falsifiable claims of the materialist hypothesis also falsify the dualist hypothesis. That's nonsense.

Here's how it works: There are falsifiable claims made by the materialist hypothesis. If any of these claims proves to be false, the materialist hypothesis is finished. This says nothing about falsifying another hypothesis, such as dualism. But the fact that none of the materialist claims have been falsified, and that all are actually supported by the evidence makes the materialist hypothesis increasingly more likely. Dualism, on the other hand, has never had a single claim supported by evidence.

interactive dualism or even idealism, give me something specific that you would accept falsifies your model that the brain creates the mind.

I've already given this to you 901 times. For example, there will be no mental phenomena without brain function. If someone showed empirical evidence of mental phenomena without brain function, this would absolutely falsify the materialist hypothesis.

Who cares what creationists are arguing.

Jesus, man. Do you not understand the definition of the term analogy?

Confidence is not evidence, it is sometimes called faith.

Faith is belief without evidence. I have mountains of evidence on my side. You have none.

I would say this discussion has become humorous if I didn't have any capacity for pity. Because you seem to actually believe what you're saying, to the point that you're willing to be intellectually dishonest and remain willfully uninformed.

I have nothing more to say on the subject, unless you actually have something new to add. I'm confident that any critical thinker who carefully reads these posts will see through your disingenuousness and intellectual cartwheels.

If I have been trolled, mark it down as a success.