Well, that's an interesting choice of language you used there. "Life experiences are stored in the brain". Wait, what? Are you saying they are stored in the brain, and are not the brain itself? Aren't you making my case for me?
No. The brain is an organ that contains neural network. It stores memories etc.
It's what the brain does. That's brain function.
So you are acknowledging they are are in fact non-material realities that go beyond just the material brain then, by virtue of them being conceptual ideas or thought? Those conceptualizations have no physical forms, aside from them being "stored" in the neural pathways.
Concepts don't exist in reality. You are being obtuse here.
We talking about it
conceptually, but what it actually is, is a physical neural network in a physical brain.
Can you look at it and examine it and think about it and talk about it as an object of thought? Yes? That that is objectivity. While "culture" has external material expressions, it in itself is non-material in a nature. Yet it most clearly exists, and has an objectivity to it in that we can look at it as an object.
Culture is a good example. It's not a thing that objectively exists. It is a
concept. A collection of customs / behaviors that a bunch of people engage in.
There is no culture without the people engaging in that behavior. The culture is a function of the population. It doesn't exist by itself.
The "mind" is similar. It doesn't exist by itself. It's a function of the physical brain.
Culture exists only as a function of a population.
Likewise the mind only exists as a function of the brain..
Culture is an objective reality
Sure.
as a function of a population.
Not as a thing by itself.
The population exists. Culture exists as an extension of that; as a function thereof.
, even if it is totally a construct of non-material thoughts, values, and beliefs. It has objective reality, and manifests itself from that non-material domain into the material domain though symbolic representations, such as art, architecture, and social infrastructure or systems.
As an emergent thing from the the thing that actually exists: the population.
Where is the culture when you remove the population?
So let's take your belief that mind is the sum of brain function.
Not a mere belief. Knowledge. Fact.
Do you consider the autonomic systems of the body, such as cell actions, heart beats, respiratory systems, etc, to be mind? Aren't those also controlled by the brain? In fact, is the body itself then "brain"? Can you reduce life itself to "brain"?
Insofar as they are regulated by the brain (not all things are, braindead people for example still have functioning organs), they are different functions of the brain.
The brain does more then one thing.
You say the brain creates consciousness. That consciousness is brain function. I argue that brain focuses consciousness in the way a magnifying glass focus light. Your philosophy would reduce the sun to the magnifying glass, that is it nothing but the brain itself. I say there certainly is a material component to it in order to be able to manifest it in ways we can observe it, like focusing light through a lens to a point. That's how this is analogous.
I don't understand. If the brain is the magnifying glass and the mind is the sunray, then what is the sun or sunray?
Where does it come from? What's the source? This is your predetermined answer for which you have zero evidence.
This is your religious view throwing sand in the eyes.
Stored in the brain, again. What is "stored" but something that is not the storage box itself! Dew on the leaf. Dew condenses and is stored on the leaf, but is not the leaf itself. It's dew. Not leaf.
That's again a false analogy.
The brain consists of a neural network. That network is formed / developped based in input. That input is life experience, sensation, emotion, etc. That's what memories are and how character develops. That's the brain function. That's the mind.
Love doesn't exist objectively?
Love is an emotion. Emotions exists. They have physical underpinnings in brain activity / chemistry.
Culture doesn't exist objectively? Values don't exist objectively?
They don't objectively exist, no. Not in the sense that they exist absent anything else.
They only exist as a collection of behaviors in an existing population. And we conceptualize such sets of behaviors in the word "culture".
It does not exist by itself. It exists only as a function of a population.
Then what on earth is going on here in the world where all these non-realities are having such a transformative effect upon the material world?
Human behavior is simply what physical humans do.
Not sure why you are trying to make it bigger then it is.
This is a philosophical belief, not objective fact.
It is not a mere belief, and definitely not a "philosophical" one.
It's what the evidence suggests. There is no evidence to my knowledge pointing to anything else.
Why does it have to be physicalism or magic beliefs?
It doesn't have to. But consider the topic. People who oppose the mind as a function of a brain are insisting that the mind is some kind of spirit or ghost or other type of ethereal magical thing that exists absent any brains.
So that's what this particular subject is about.
The fact you word these things like this, shows you are reducing anything beyond the hard sciences to prerational fluff. That's not what I or anyone else who is challenging these reductionist views are arguing for. We ourselves see the same error with that as you do. You mistakenly equate what eludes your view, as that.
Then I have no idea what you are arguing for.
Well that's great and I applaud that. So do I. But I'm not arguing for magic, nor or any of the other posters I've seen in this thread, save for a couple of the fundamentalists.
Then what ARE you arguing for?
And this is why I was challenging others to define exactly what they mean by things like "mind" or consciousness".
And I've done exactly that on multiple occasions. It's brain function.
You can't very well say these are "the sum of brain function", when you don't even define what those are.
What's there to define further? The brain is a neural network. Do you know what a neural network is?
AI's also work by neural networks. In fact, the brain is where the devs got the idea.
It's pretty much the standard in machine learning. It works.
Hopefully this helps clarify a little better what is being meant and what is being challenged here.
Not at all actually.
In fact, after all this, it sounds like you are just arguing for the sake of arguing.
So be clear here for once: what do YOU think the mind is?
And try to answer without vague non-clarifying "analogies".
