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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 27, 2013 13:00:44 GMT
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Post by pete on Sept 12, 2013 18:47:37 GMT
perhaps the brain is capable of housing thought to some degree - using only the brain to think with can give you conclusions if that is the aim - i see thought as being a condition of being, a state. Nietzsche thought. then the woman he loved went off to side up with Freud...Freud exemplified cerebral thought - he mocked Nietzsche by interpreting thought as being primitivism. Freud had an earner - until suicidal tendency proved his limits. Freud was an idiot but a clever one, the way politicians are clever. Freud was good for industrialists and social controllers, they pedal the same bikes, are keen to limit thought with false morality. no more profound than Bernays and all the other propagandists.
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Post by chavoux on Jul 8, 2015 18:04:46 GMT
I am a Computer Scientist, so not sure how much sense this will make to others. But to what extend can the brain and mind/consciousness/soul be compared to a computer (hardware=brain) and software programs (thoughts/mind)? Is it helpful at all? The computer itself can only "understand" 0's and 1's on which it can perform a limited number of operations. But these operations on their own is totally insufficient to explain what the computer is doing expect trivially. I.e. by only looking only at the hardware level it is impossible to determine that the computers is actually running a spreadsheet or a word processor program. It is only a bunch of binary numbers being operated on. Is it possible that in our brains and minds are similar and materialism is therefore false, since it can only see the 0's and 1's, but can make no sense of what the computer is actually doing.... a spreadsheet or scientific calculation or bookkeeping program or game?
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jul 12, 2015 13:02:11 GMT
Chavoux, thank you for your post. I'm no good when it comes to understanding how hardware treats binary, but can you enlighten me what 'tells' the hardware what the data is and how it has to process it? Is the binary data really as underdetermined as that? That is quite difficult for me to understand.
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jonkon
Master of the Arts
Posts: 111
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Post by jonkon on Jul 13, 2015 19:40:42 GMT
The software sets up the hardware's initial conditions and constraints so that the hardware behaves in a certain fashion that can be interpreted by the software as performing a desired task. The relationship between hardware and software is a many-to-many mathematical mapping so that a given application (i.e. a "book") can be implemented on many different platforms (i.e. a printed book or an e-reader) while a given platform (i.e. a PC) can be used for many different applications (i.e. a "book" or a "spreadsheet").
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Post by chavoux on Jul 14, 2015 22:14:21 GMT
At the lowest level computer hardware is just a bunch of numbers (actually a way to represent those numbers with small electric on/off circuits and magnetic fields) and a finite number of operations on those numbers (including some boolean: true or false - operations). So it can send a message at the hardware level to colour a certain pixel on a screen a certain combination of Red, Green and Blue values.... at the lowest level, the hardware has no idea that the combination of coloured pixels actually formed the letter "a" or is part of a scene in a computer game. It just outputs different intensity colours in different places on the computer screen. Software determines "why" a specific combination of numbers would be sent to the graphics card... whether it is a letter in a document, or a value in a spreadsheet or a part of a 3D scene in a game. And my point is that this level of understanding (as seen by software programmers and users), describes the actual use of the computer and can not be determined by simply looking at the hardware state of the computer. There is a definite connection between the software and the hardware, in that any single software command needs to be translated into one or more basic hardware operations. But I don't want to push the analogy too far. My point was simply that only looking at the hardware (the brain) will never enable us to understand the software (mind). The whole is actually more than its parts. And just like an issue with faulty hardware can cause software to fail (e.g. the infamous "blue screen of death" on Windows were often triggered by some hardware failure) so brain damage will impair "correct" mind functioning. But not all mind issues are because of physical issues. If we were engineers with no knowledge of computers and reverse-engineered a computer to know exactly what its full range of basic hardware operations were, we would still not know what a computer was actually used for. We could make some good guesses about what it could be used for, (once we figured out that it could be programmed = that it could interpret software), but unless we understood or at least acknowledged the existence of programs (software), we could never understand what a computer actually is or is currently being used for. My point is also that just because software is not something physical, does not make it any less real. Indeed, a modern computer will not makes any sense apart from software. Hardware can exist without software and software can exist (e.g. as source code printed on paper) apart from hardware, but neither would constitute a functional computer. Is the same true for us as humans?
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jul 15, 2015 17:20:07 GMT
Thanks to you both, the analogy is clearer to me now.
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