[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by skidoo

I can say definitively that if I destroy your brain, I destroy your consciousness.

Unless you can also describe how the brain can generate consciousness, you cannot definitively say destroying the brain, destroys consciousness.

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

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

... I, like other scientists have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands ......how I came to take seriously, even to believe, that the consciousness of man, the mind, is not something to be reduced to the brain-mechanism....' - Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, famous for mapping the functions of various regions of the brain. (Few have attempted to repeat some of Penfield's experiments)

I never said it was "slam dunked."

Here is what you wrote 'I think that's a succinct slam-dunk of dualism'.

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.

I do not rate Paul Kurtz's political type of scepticism, there is little scientific about it IMHO.

The origin of the word scepticism is consideration or doubt.

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?

All of these prove that you have not read Radin's work. Radin has never attempted to prove 'some non-material aspect to our reality' Like you, Radin for many years has stated he thinks consciousness (and psi) is probably brain generated. But unlike you he is willing to consider it might not be.

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

Are you referring to Novella's list? Is that it?

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.

So what did you mean by 'I think that's a succinct slam-dunk of dualism'.

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.

Where were these published before as predictions, if not, it is ad hoc.

Dualism, on the other hand, has never had a single claim supported by evidence.

How do you know this, are you making psychic claim here to know the unknowable?

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.

Very difficult to falsify as you will claim any mental effect not measured physically did not really occur. However I referred to Libet reference that it could be occurring. As I previously mentioned Near Death Experiences are suggestive evidence of this, which are much harder to debunk than you might think

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.

What we fundamentally disagree on is .......you are saying the mind=brain with what sounds 100% certainty, I am saying there is not sufficient evidence to be so confident that the mind and brain are the same thing..... at least yet.