If mental images aren’t physical objects, how can materialism explain them?

[behnamhb1999]

Right now, just close your eyes. Imagine a red apple.

You have just produced something fascinating: a visual experience without an external visual input at all!!

No light entered your eyes. No photons hit the retina. There was no external object to cause this image. Yet, you saw something, a red apple, with shape, color, with even a shiny surface maybe, or maybe even having a stem!!

Now just ask yourself: where is that image?

Materialists say, it's just brain activity. Some certain neurons in your visual cortex triggered and fired, mimicking or immitating what would happen when you saw an actual apple. But this answer, although partly true, totally misses the point of the question.. the neural activity is the mechanism, the image is the experience!! When your visual cortex fires in some particular pattern, it's just a physical event. It has a location: in neurons, in tissue, in the skull!! It has physical properties.. it's electrochemical, it's measurable, it's spatial.

But the red apple you saw in your imagination has no physical location. It's not in your neurons, it is mot in the skull. You cannot point to where the redness of the apple is in your skull!! You cannot weigh the apple you imagined.. it has no mass, no coordinate, nothing.

The imagined apple exists, you just experienced it. But it exists nowhere in the physical world. It's just in your mind. And if it exists only in your mind and it's not physical, then your mind contains non-physical things. Which means your mind is not entirely physical!! Here we can say consciousness is beyond this physical world.. and if that's true.. maybe after your body dies this consciousness can still survive and experience!!

[Anonymous]

It doesn't matter what side of the debate you are on and how scientific it is. The fact remains that you are using mental masturbation to run away from yourself. ㅤ

Stop imagining anything and brake all your tthoughts. Do this after abstaining from dopamine and endorphin spikes and upon stopping your mental chatter, your traumas will float up ready to process.

[OneViewpoint]

You're stretching here. The apple doesn't exist. The idea of an apple exists in your consciousness. But the idea is not a 3 dimensional physical reality. So how does the idea exist. All evidence to date suggests that the idea only exists in your consciousness because your consciousness exists in a biological machine (your body) that supports your consciousness. If the body dies the consciousness ceases to exist. We have exactly zero evidence to the contrary.

But like the argument for Gods, your conjecture is asking us to prove a negative, that the consciousness does not survive the death of the physical body supporting it. And you're right back to religious belief as fact. Sorry, your conjecture is not fact. The burden is on you to prove that your conjecture is true.

[behnamhb1999]

You said the idea exists in consciousness, not in the brain. I agree. Now just tell me: what is consciousness, physically? where exactly is it? What is its mass, location, and its physical properties? You cannot answer this, and neither can any neuroscientist on earth. Now because we haven't looked, but because the Hard Problem of Consciousness (raised by a non-religious guy David Chalmers), asking why brain processes produce any inner experience at all, is totally unsolved after years of research.

You said we have zero evidence to the contrary. That's incorrect. Dr. Pim van Lommel's study in The Lancet documented patients reporting accurate details about their surroundings during clinical death, even when they had flat brain wave and zero brain activity. If consciousness is simply brain activity, that's impossible. Yet, it happened, repeatedly, and it is in a peer-reviewed medical study.

You said the burden of proof is on me. But you made a positive claim, "consciousness is produced by brain and ceases at death". That is your claim. Prove it. Explain how 86 billion "separate" neurons produce only one unified experience. Explain where the redness of red is in the brain. Explain how a person accurately percieves their surroundings while clinically dead. Explain free will in only physical terms.

And by the way, if your mind is purely neurons firing according to physics, then your belief that "consciosness is just neurons firing" is also just neurons firing. Neurons firing are not true or false. They just happen. So, according to yourself, you have no reason to trust that your conclusion is actually true and separate from just a physical event that happened to occur in your skull.

And friend, my position hasn't been refuted at all, you have just claimed against it. That's a very different thing.

[OneViewpoint]

OK, I'll prove it. Give me a baseball bat and hold still for a few seconds. Let's see what happens to your consciousness after 5 swings of the baseball bat. You're a "believer" using the same lame arguments as religious freaks to justify your beliefs. The only thing you have right is the fact we don't know how consciousness works in a biological organism.

Just like we don't have explanations for dark matter, dark energy, gravity, or how quantum phenomena are connected to the macro world of relativity. But you people can't live with "we don't know". So you make up "Gods" and bullshit about consciousness that suits your own fantasies of "eternal life" and call it facts.

[behnamhb1999]

Ok, so you just opened your response with a fantasy of hitting me with a baseball bat. Whether that was an example, or what you want to do to people who think differently, I'm not sure. 😅 But what you said is not a counterargument really. Anyways you made a remarkable admission!!

You said "The only thing you have right is the fact we don't know how consciousness works in a biological organism."

Friend, do you understand what you just admitted?

That is the entire debate, that was my entire argument actually. I said consciousness can't currently be explained by physical processes, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is unsolved, so materialism hasn't been proved to be true!!

You just agreed with me.

Your previous response was all about me having zero evidence and that the burden of proof is on me, and now you admit that science does not know how consciousness works. Which is it? Either science has explained consciouness and my argument fails, or science hasn't explained it and you can't dismiss my argument so confidently. You cannot have it both ways man.

[behnamhb1999]

Now that baseball bat example of yours, because you seem to think it proves something. Ok, all it proves is that damaging the brain affects consciousness. No problem, I already agreed with that. I also said it in my original argument. The brain is actually the instrument through which the soul interfaces with the physical world. Damage the instrument, damage the interface!! But here is your problem, damaging a radio receiver destroys the sound coming out of it. Does it prove that the radio signal doesn't exist? Does it prove the broadcast station doesn't exist? If I smash your television with a baseball bat, the picture disappears.. no? Does that mean the TV station stopped broadcasting? Of course not. Actually destroying the receive doesn't tell you anything about whether the signal exists totally separately from the receiver!! So your baseball bat argument does no harm to my argument. It actually illustrates it. The brain is the receiver, smash it, and yes, the interface with the physical world is broken. That says nothing about whether the soul, the signal, continues.

You actually have to show that "consciousness = brain activity". Not that it correlates with it or is affected by it. You never showed that. No one has ever shown that. That is exactly what you admitted no one knows how to show.

[OneViewpoint]

Ah, there it is. Your religious brain is showing. "The soul". Now we're making progress. Another of your unproven religious beliefs peeking out from your attempt at seeming logical. Show me a soul. Prove that humans have souls and dogs do not.

Radio receiver? No Jesus boy, I'm talking about damaging the radio transmitter, the origin of the signal. A receiver is a passive listener. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the signal. You suck at constructing analogies dude.

Unless of course you're arguing that your brain is a passive receiver of information created by someone else and you are unable to generate any original thought. Therefore you're only capable of playing back stuff you've heard elsewhere. Wait a minute... that's actually plausible in your case.

[behnamhb1999]

You also compared consciousness to dark matter and gravity, things science hasn't fully explained yet but is working on. You think it sounds reasnable but isn't. Yes, dark matter and gravity are things we don't know fully about, but we are certain that they physical phenomena. We already know they exist in phyiscal space. We know they have measurable physical effects. We know they are the kinds of things physics can describe. We are only unceratin about the details, not that they are physical!!

Consciousness is different in kind, not just understanding of details. It's not like "we haven't found all the details yet", it's just "why does any physical process create inner experience at all?". It's not a gap in data. It's a gap between two completely different kinds of things, physical process and subjective experience. Every scientist who has just thought about it carefully, such as atheists like David Chalmers, Calin McGinn and others, says this is not just an unsolved problem. It may be a problem that physics is totally incapable of solving!! Because physical science describes things from the outside (objective), and consciousness is just the inside of things (subjective).

[behnamhb1999]

Ah, ok. You said "religious people can't live with not knowing, and so invent God to fill the gap". But you did the very same thing. You filled the gap with materialism!! You don't know how conciousness works. You admitted it. But rather than going "we don't know", you immediately concluded "therefore it must be phyisical, therefore God doesn't exist, therefore consciousness ends at death." You actually fill the gap with your prefered answer and then call it science.

The honest positiong not knowing, doesn't mean "therefore materialism is true", it means "we just don't know", and all serious explanations deserve examination, just like the explanation that says consciousness is non-physical. Just like the peer-reviewed medical evidence of consciousness during clinical death of course you never addresed. 😁

You totally dismissed the Van Lommel Lancet without even pointing to it at all. Is that scientific skepticism? 🤔 It's just ideologic filtering.. this is exactly what you accuse religious people of.

[OneViewpoint]

Yes Jesus boy, we do not understand consciousness yet. Nor do we understand dark energy or dark matter. That's why we gave it the dumb dark prefix. To keep it from sounding like we know what we're talking about. It could end up being a thing or the interaction of several things or a limit of our 3D biological senses to perceive reality. But I did not jump straight to my favorite fantasy of eternal life to reinforce my desire to ward off the reality of my own mortality. And we're right back around the same circle for the millionth time. Religiots fall back to asking everyone else to prove a negative... that their fantasy doesn't exist. You're right, I can't prove that your fantasy solution to your own fear of mortality doesn't exist. But here's a question... why weren't you honest about dragging out this tired religious argument... AGAIN? Why did you feel the need to hide your religious agenda?

[behnamhb1999]

Oh, ok. You say "show me a soul". Gladly. Right after you show me consciousness!! 😁 Show me where it is, what it weighs, what its physical coordinates are. You can't. You admitted you can't. Your own words "we don't know how consciousness works in a biological organism". So, you say I prove something you can not even physically describe yourself.

You said "prove humans have and dogs do not". I never claims dogs don't. 🤔 It's what you invented and handed to me. Stay with what I argued man!!

Ok, fair point on your analogy of transmitter, so let's use your analogy then. If the brain is the transmitter (the origin of consciousness), then destroying it should produce nothing. Silence.. blackness, zero experience. Forever!!

So explain van Lommel's Lancet study. Patients with zero brain activity, flatline, no electrical signal at all, accurately reported verified details of their surroundings during cardiac arrest. In your model, the transmitter was off, nothing should have been broadcasting, yet something was. You gotta either engage with that peer-reviewed medical evidence or just admit your model cannot explain it. Ok?

I'm not Christian at all by the way.

You admitted science cannot explain consciousness. You have not explained how flatline patients perceive their environment. You have not answered how 86 billion separate neurons produce one unified experience. I have not been refuted on a single point. Not one.

[behnamhb1999]

Man, I have one question from you, and it's the one you've avoided the entire time:

How do you explain verified conscious perception during clinical death when the brain has zero measurable electrical activity?

Not dark matter. Not mortality fears. Not my alleged agenda. Ok? No name-callings. Just answer the question.

[OneViewpoint]

Let's see your peer reviewed studies with more than one data point. Not some bullshit from a fellow Jesus freak reviewed by Evangelicals. Not one study. Let's see the research and the opinions.

[behnamhb1999]

Ah, ok. Interesting. You went from "Zero Evidence" to "Show me more studies". That's good progress. Let's go:

1. Pin van Lommel - the Lancet 2001

Prospective study. 344 cardiac arrest patients. %18 reported NDE with verified and accurute details of their surroundings during flatline and no brain activity. This is published in one of the most cited medical journals on earth. Not a religious publication. Not evangelical. Medical science.

2. Sam Parnia - University of Southampton (2014)

AWARE study. 2,206 cardiac arrest patients across 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. Documents conscious awareness during clinical death. Parnia is a critical care physician at NYU. It is peer reviewed. Multi-hospital. Multi-country.

3. Bruce Greyson - University of Virginia

This is over 40 years of peer-reviewed research on NDE experiences. It is piblished in journals like Psychiatry, Journal Nervous and Mental Disease and Journal of Near-Death Studies. Greyson is a psychiatris, not theologian.

4.

[behnamhb1999]

4. Pim van Lommel - Resuscitation (2008)

This is a follow-up study. It verifies original findings with longitudinal data on the same patients years later.

5. Keneth Ring and Sharon Cooper - Journal of Near-Death Studies (1997)

This is interesting. They studied blind patients who reported acurate visual experience during NDEs. These are people who had been blind by birth and yet they describe acucurate details of their surroundings during clinical death. These are people who never saw anything in their lives. They are seeing things during death.

These are not one-point data. These are decades of research, multiple institutions, multiple countries, multiple peer-reviewed journals, by cardiologists, psychiatrists and critical care physicians. None of them are evangelicals!!

[jshm2]

You're confused. Materialism does not have to claim that a mental image is a tiny physical picture inside the brain. It claims that having a mental image is a physical process or state of a physical system.

Using your example, of a red apple - it might be of an "apple" you've seen before, but most likely it will be something that doesn't exist in reality. Either it's colour, shape or both will be something you've imagined, hence has no link to the material.

[NathanDavis]

just because you can't locate something... that doesn't mean it does not exist

[behnamhb1999]

Who said it doesn't exist? I said it's not a physical phenomenon, because if you do a brain scan, you don't see an apple there 😐, you only see brain.

It exists, but not physically.

[NathanDavis]

actually... you can see the brain thinking of the apple, and the color, and other things... there are mappings of the brain, and these are all physical, tangible and measurable phenomena

so much so, that some AI machines are already trying to turn them into visuals...

[strateguy632]

i missed your point. physical solid brain cells worked so i remembered that red apple?

[AngryCarl3]

There's no clear mechanism for consciousness to exist outside of the brain.