Yeah, the comic’s story and message are beautiful, but the “sleep kills you” argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It’s not about consciousness, it’s about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don’t stop as soon as you fall asleep.
There’s an argument to be made about how you’re never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you’re constantly changing. That’s also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we’re talking about.
There’s an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn’t broken. That’s also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it’s the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn’t broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
No, we do know that the brain makes the mind. Physical changes to the brain can make predictable changes to the mind, but your thoughts don’t change the structure of your brain.
While your first point is true, your second is not. It’s actually been found that if you change the way you think about stuff, your brain actually changes. It’s this little thing called neuroplasticity and it’s fucking wild. - https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain
We’ve also observed intelligence and seeming awareness from things like fungus, which don’t even have brains.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Vasanas are a related topic. But these are results of physical interactions between neurons in your brain. There’s nothing nonphysical about your mind that creates or alters matter supernaturally. My point stands, the mind is, as far as a naturalistic philosophy is concerned, an emergent property of complex interactions in the brain.
The neurons are what make the thoughts. I acknowledge the existence of neuroplasticity and vasanas, but the mind is an emergent property of the physical neurons. If your thoughts are having an effect on the brain, that is because there are physical processes happening in the brain that are affecting the brain.
Except the cause of those physical processes seems to be something that by itself is not a physical process. If I can just decide to rewire my brain and that works, what prompted the rewiring? What told these neurons to say “We should do something different?”
Because that’s essentially what’s happening during neuroplasticity, something invisible and intangible (the mind) is changing the brain’s building blocks.
It seems to be quite the plothole in the Physicalist Paradigm and the only objection appears to be “Naw uh”
Yeah, the comic’s story and message are beautiful, but the “sleep kills you” argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It’s not about consciousness, it’s about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don’t stop as soon as you fall asleep.
There’s an argument to be made about how you’re never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you’re constantly changing. That’s also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we’re talking about.
There’s an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn’t broken. That’s also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it’s the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn’t broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
We don’t even know that the brain makes the mind, it could easily be the other way around.
No, we do know that the brain makes the mind. Physical changes to the brain can make predictable changes to the mind, but your thoughts don’t change the structure of your brain.
While your first point is true, your second is not. It’s actually been found that if you change the way you think about stuff, your brain actually changes. It’s this little thing called neuroplasticity and it’s fucking wild. - https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain
We’ve also observed intelligence and seeming awareness from things like fungus, which don’t even have brains.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Vasanas are a related topic. But these are results of physical interactions between neurons in your brain. There’s nothing nonphysical about your mind that creates or alters matter supernaturally. My point stands, the mind is, as far as a naturalistic philosophy is concerned, an emergent property of complex interactions in the brain.
If my thought moved the neurons as opposed to my neurons making the thought as demonstrated by neuroplasticity, than the brain cannot be the origin.
The neurons are what make the thoughts. I acknowledge the existence of neuroplasticity and vasanas, but the mind is an emergent property of the physical neurons. If your thoughts are having an effect on the brain, that is because there are physical processes happening in the brain that are affecting the brain.
Except the cause of those physical processes seems to be something that by itself is not a physical process. If I can just decide to rewire my brain and that works, what prompted the rewiring? What told these neurons to say “We should do something different?”
Because that’s essentially what’s happening during neuroplasticity, something invisible and intangible (the mind) is changing the brain’s building blocks.
It seems to be quite the plothole in the Physicalist Paradigm and the only objection appears to be “Naw uh”
See Also: https://ykulbashian.medium.com/emergence-isnt-an-explanation-it-s-a-prayer-ef239d3687bf
If you disagree, then we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.