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Thursday, September 11, 2008
Immaterial thoughts
Richard Dawkins' Fallacious Central Argument - Beliefnet Forums: "I diverge from the materialists in that I find credible evidence that thoughts and ideas are more than just electrical and chemical impulses in the brain, although those electrical and chemical impulses are necessary for the creation of the thought or idea. But there seems to be a resonance in the brain that we identify as a thought or idea. It would be analogous to a note played on a piano. It is identifiable as a piano note rather than a washtub base note because of the complex resonances in the piano that shape and color the note. True the hammer must strike the string to produce the resonances, but the vibration of the string is only the start of the sound of a piano note. Now that I think of it, the sound of a piano is is an immaterial, identifiable referent that is neither imaginary nor non-existent."
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3 comments:
Is the title a tautology? Aren't all thoughts immaterial?
The word "immaterial" is often misunderstood. The "Material Existence" is matter, energy and space for matter/energy to be existent within. Energy is as much material in the sense that is mass, accelerated by the spoeed of gravity.
Energy may be material, but I am not talking about the energy distribution in the brain when I am talking about thoughts. For lack of a better word I find that a thought is a mental resonance that occurs when a particular pattern of neurons in the brain is stimulated. The stimulation is a necessary condition, but not sufficient for thought. Without the resonance that says this configuration is important and and must be tagged as "this specific idea" the neural pattern will be lost in the noise of mental activity. I see no way to measure or identify the resonance except as the identifying idea, which is as good a definition of immaterial that I can come up with.
I don't think the thoughts floating about in my mind are real in any material sense of the word. No one could measure the elation I feel as I awaken to a beautiful sunrise, or even notice that I have the emotion, unless I tell them. They might measure a blip in the pleasure center, but there is no way they could associate it with the sunrise rather than the fart.
But this immaterial resonance interacts strongly with the brain to reinforce certain neural patterns. I find that it is separate from but contained in the brain, and is what I think of as the mind.
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