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Originally Posted by Open Mind  Materialism (matter creates mind) is also an argument from ignorance. No one knows how a brain can create (or evolved) consciousness.
Correlation does not prove causation .... specific psychoactive chemicals are not generating specific content (e.g. bicycles) in the hallucination ... alcohol might make one person happy, another person angry .. arguably it is just disrupting the brain from grounding the conscious mind to a shared material reality. The only difference between normal conscious experiences and hallucinations is that the latter do not model material reality.
The consciousness when not ground to a shared reality, hallucinates. i.e. has a individual conscious experience. The brain/body/matter is merely holding people's consciousness to a material reality ... if upon brain death telepathic processes increase, virtual realities not following material reality may evolve.
Bodily survival functions have evolved local to brain, perhaps some memory types too ... however currently one is free to speculate certain types of experience/memory are not stored local to brain such as long-term memory, procedural memory, tacit memory, etc. since these can not be traced to specific areas.  Correct but materialism doesn't have a mechanism for consciousness either ... just a bunch of correlations filled with a materialism of the gaps 
Lets move to the thread above .....if you want .... rather than derail this one. |
The two arguments are not symmetrical. You are simply postulating a version of consciousness that fits your preconceived worldview, without the proper level of supporting evidence. It is all based upon an argument from ignorance that questions the commonly-held view that consciousness is a physical process, but does not rely on any evidence that would point towards consciousness being something other than a physical process.
It is not enough to say "we do not have a working model of how the brain produces consciousness." No scientific discovery has ever rested on such an argument from ignorance, and no scientific discovery ever will.
You have severely misrepresented the "symmetry" of the two arguments and their corresponding reliance on arguments from ignorance, given the current state of our understanding of consciousness.
The standard model of the brain producing consciousness is not, in fact, an argument from ignorance. It is a reasonable hypothesis derived from countless observations made in the real world. We have case studies of other species which display upwardly-trending levels of "consciousness," which correlate to relative brain size. How does your "model" account for this?
We have targeted areas of the brain that control portions of our consciousness, and have found that interacting with them can reliably and repeatably alter a person's consciousness in consistent ways (forcing "out of body" experiences, memory loss, increase in temper / bad moods, increase in kindness / happy moods, etc.). If the brain really is just a "receiver," than altering certain portions of the brain should result in different effects - i.e. a "weaker" signal, not a totally different signal. I could not, for example, change my television settings so that all television show soundtracks are replaced with Nintendo sound effects. All I could do is scramble the signal to make it weaker or stronger. This is not our experience with the brain.
You also are being dishonest about your characterization of drug-induced hallucinations. You claim that they are not the same hallucinations as if this is some sort of evidence that the drug / brain combination are not producing the hallucinations, a weak claim at best. In fact, drug-induced hallucinations are as similar as they could conceivably be, given the different body types, doses, surroundings, memories, and experiences of people taking drugs.
Mushrooms affect people differently than LSD, which affects people differently than certain pharmaceuticals, etc. The affects can be broadly categorized across the different drug types and are actually remarkably similar. The differences in specific hallucinations are easily explained away by body type, dose, experience with drugs in the past, different memories, and different surroundings. To claim that just because two different people on the same drug do not see the exact same thing means that consciousness is not produced by the brain is laughable.
It also seems to me that if your model is the correct one, drug-induced hallucinations
should be more consistent, regardless of the factors cited above. If we are simply accessing some higher form of consciousness that is unaffected by the drug, shouldn't the experiences be the same? Or, at the very least, shouldn't the same person taking the same drug at different times experience the same hallucinations? This is simply not the case.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Your arguments from ignorance are not compelling.
06-16-2009, 03:15 PM
