by slimboyfat 29 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
What's the role of the bus driver? Does he tell anyone about the job he does? Is he a fact-spreader? Guess he can only fact-spread if he is conscious. And he can only drive the bus if he is conscious.
You wouldn't want to get on a bus with an unconscious bus driver. Nearly as bad as joining the Watchtower Chariot with its 8 dodgy drivers.
Watched the video. Lots of word salad there. At first I thought he was just making an argument for consciousness being an emergent property. But then, it quickly veered into everything being thought/mind. After that, the tems used are just so general and undefined, I'm sure each viewer is taking a completely different meaning from his speech.
Semantic shift - the meaning of the words is deliberately slippery and the audience interpret them according to how they understand them. Therefore each member of the audience can get a completely different message
More intellectual fun than ice-dancing on banana skins.
It is true that the arrivals of the buses are based upon bus schedules, but the but schedules are in turn based upon ridership patterns. When ridership levels drop considerably in certain routes, then the bus schedules for those routes change to lower frequency of stops and sometimes the routes are even discontinued. Likewise if some areas start having much higher ridership (or are even anticipated to soon have higher ridership or even to need ridership, such as due to newly created buildings on the route), the bus schedules for those routes change to higher frequency of stops and sometimes even a new route is created.
Exactly.
And the schedule also has a relationship to time. In my area I have noticed that the 12:00 midnight bus is significantly less populated by face-mask wearing customers than the 8:00 am one.
However regardless of the position of the planet earth in relation to the sun and moon , the customers all wear facemasks but the driver doesn't. Still scratching my head on that one.
I’m not sure I’ve made this clear.
The point is that there is a current fashion for neuroscientists to measure brain activity and attempt to correlate these with thoughts and feelings. Some parts of the brain consistently display activity at the same time that a person has certain thoughts or feelings. This understandably leads many to conclude that the brain activity being observed actually causes the thoughts and feelings. The bus analogy is meant to illustrate that this deduction could false.
Because, just as the fact that queues at buses, and buses arriving, tend to coincide, doesn’t mean that queues actually cause buses to arrive, so it may not be the case that brain activity actually causes thoughts and feelings. There may be a deeper process at work here which accounts for the correlation of brain activity and thoughts that doesn’t necessitate one being caused by the other.
All that this is meant to show is that the conclusion that brain activity causes thoughts may be incorrect. It is not intended to prove that it is incorrect. Other stronger arguments can be adduced for that purpose.
Most importantly, there is no account offered by materialists to explain what a phrase such as “brain activity causes thoughts” actually means. How does it do that? Brain activity and thoughts are two different kinds of things. To say one causes the other is pretty incoherent as it stands. It’s not being flippant to point out that the phrase “brain activity causes thoughts” is like saying “this chocolate bar will turn into a Mozart symphony” or “ I’m going to turn Wednesday into a dancing pony”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “brain activity causes thoughts” is an impossible description of reality. But it is pretty weird as an “explanation” because it explains nothing.
then they test the hypothesis and soon find out it fails when busses stop even when no people are there.
Except....in every bus I've ever ridden, if there is no one waiting at the stop, the bus doesn't stop.
Why would a bus pull over and stop when there is no one there?
Now let's add in the complication of people requesting to exit the bus when someone signals from inside the bus....
Another possible way to look at the relationship between brain and consciousness may be to examine the way radios and radio waves interact. If someone from 1000 years ago discovered a radio he would be excused if he thought the voice was coming solely from inside the radio. If consciousness is a fundamental part of reality, then we may just possess the biological equipment necessary to receive and transmit it to our being.
One of the arguments for assuming that the brain produces consciousness is that, if the brain is damaged, consciousness is impaired or altered. However, this doesn't invalidate the idea that the brain may be a receiver and transmitter of consciousness. A radio doesn't produce the music that comes through it, but if it is damaged, its ability to transmit the music will be impaired.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-06-spiritual-science-perspective-consciousness.html
Yes very much so. David Chalmers is excellent on this topic, as is Donald Hoffman. But at the moment I am most convinced by the metaphysical idealism of Bernardo Kastrup.
"There may be a deeper process at work here which accounts for the correlation of brain activity and thoughts that doesn’t necessitate one being caused by the other."
But whatever that deeper process is it will be related to the physical, biological and chemical components of the brain because if you take away the brain there is no thought or consciousness.
Consciousness is not separate from the brain. The relationship between the physical, biological and chemical makeup of the brain and "thoughts" or consciousness are clearly not understood fully but you cannot separate that process from out with the brain, its matter, its chemical and biological processes either.
