3. Give me your brainscan and I’ll tell you what you’re thinking
On a modern brainscan (PET, SPECT), researchers can see which parts of the brain are specifically active when a person is looking, feeling, imagining, visualizing, etc. One can of course look at this as ‘proof’ that everything psychological is based on a physical substratum. Mind-materialists do like this very much. Human mind in a mind-materialist’s view is that what the human brain produces, like a kind of software that is produced by the hardware. Brainscans are supposed to be proof of this.
◊◊◊
Not so.
◊◊◊
Present-day brain scanning shows that mind and brain change together. So far so true, but this, very important to see, is really all that it shows. It does not prove that the former is caused by the latter. Both can be caused by something else, or both can be the same thing, still, they change together.
◊◊◊
If you look at it very closely, the being-the-same hypothesis becomes very probable. Mind is as complex as brain is and vice versa. In addition to this, every smallest change in the one is accompanied by a change in the other, not after some time (not even a split second) but really at the same time. The more detailed the brain imaging becomes, the more the findings that are pouring out of it also show this to be the case.
◊◊◊
It all points to the fact that mind and brain (in a broad sense) are the same thing. Talking in terms of mind and talking in terms of brain are just 2 distinct ways of talking about one and the same, like two sides of a coin. Therefore if one ‘changes one’s mind’, one changes one’s brain. Thinking mind and thinking brain cannot exist apart from each other.
◊◊◊
Mind-materialists say that everything about human mind is material. They are right. Everything about human mind is material… and psychological at the same time.
◊◊◊
Therefore after all, what a mind-materialist says is the same as what a mind-mentalist says when claiming that ‘human thinking exists only in the -immaterial- mind’.
◊◊◊
So let them finally shake hands and go in peace.
There is a lot of real work to be done.
◊◊◊
Related Posts
35. Fear of flying? Let the sky not be thy limit.
The world is becoming smaller and smaller. Airplanes are getting bigger and bigger. Only fear of flying remains the same. This means that more and more people are in a position that they need to fly, or would like to fly, but are afraid to. The airport is their closed door. ◊◊◊ I have good Read the full article…
2. Why diets put more weight on the scale
We all know it, or should know it by now. People who go on a diet, in many or even most cases eventually end up gaining more weight than they have lost in the process. Why? And how to prevent it? ◊◊◊ Think of a small boat. You are in the boat. So are ‘you’. Read the full article…
25. Getting beyond the symptom is not easy
In another of these ‘sticky thoughts’, I explained that most medications work only symptomatically. This is: they relieve symptoms and this only as long as you take them. If you stop taking them, then either your symptoms return, or you have self-healed in the meantime. ◊◊◊ This is logical, since going beyond the symptom is Read the full article…