Thursday, March 12, 2015

There is a conversation with Hugo...

Here, for anyone interested.

3 comments:

Phoenix said...

Stan

Do you have any material on the relationship between consciousness and the brain stem?I can't find a single source on the web.except from the Atheist's point of view.
Physicalists claim the brain stem creates consciousness because a)damage to the brain stem causes a coma and b) although there are people living realatively normal lives with much of their brains missing,however,no one has ever lived or was conscious with an inactive brain stem.

Stan said...

Interesting.
No, I don't have that information. But I suspect that neither do the people making those claims. That's because when someone says "no one ever...", they are saying something which they cannot know.

So general statements like "damage to the brain stem causes..." are likely false, because it does not specify the nature or extent of the damage, nor the precise location of the damage to the stem.

Further, it is now known that a person can be conscious without being able to act as if conscious, because motor skills have been ceased for whatever reason.

Speculation without significant testing and data is actually meaningless, unless accompanied with a proposal to provide an hypothesis which can be tested. Otherwise it is merely induction at best (requiring comprehensive and accurate observations, which they undoubtedly do not have), and is without objective knowledge value. I.e., WAGing (wild-ass guessing).

This is a mark of faux science on the order of phrenology, which said "this cranial bump is associated with...", one of the spectacular failures of induction as knowledge.

Phoenix said...

Thanks,it also seems that most neuroscientists subscribe to these physicalist theories,and the Atheist disciple accepts them on an appeal to authority basis.Any studies with counter results will be rejected because they are in the minority.