Philosophical Speculations

To a Materialist I could ask please pretty please show me this 'matter' of which you speak . . . needless to say this matter/material would have to exist outside of experience, outside of being aware of it. Of course this is not possible - no one has ever produced or found this matter, so matter re...

Brad, This is an imprecise analogy but Solms thinks of the cortex as like the memory in the computer where all of the images of consciousness are formed. Raw consciousness - the sense of feeling to be like something - is from the brainstem. So the human mind would have little of its capabilities wi...

Brad, This is an imprecise analogy but Solms thinks of the cortex as like the memory in the computer where all of the images of consciousness are formed. Raw consciousness - the sense of feeling to be like something - is from the brainstem. So the human mind would have little of its capabilities wit...

BTW, here's Bernardo FB post on Friston's theories which also are very germane to Solms. https://www.facebook.com/BernardoKastrup/posts/some-of-you-will-have-noticed-that-in-my-academic-papers-i-refer-to-karl-friston/2121971417865722/ Fundamentally, neuroscience in idealistic terms is about explaini...

Dana,

There is much new in this thread if there is any interest whatsoever in science and neuroscience. There are always new observations and correlations. If people want to retread the usual arguments, there really hasn't been anything new since Bishop Berkeley and Kant.

Mark Solms, one of the leading proponents of the brainstem idea, has an interesting book out The Hidden Spring. https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Spring-Journey-Source-Consciousness/dp/0393542017 It goes somewhat into the brainstem argument and cortex bias of neuroscience but it also deals a lot with en...

Jim ... the issue I'm having is with the statement: "However, nonlocality and other QM strangeness are physical." How does this not presume an ontology of physicalism as a matter of fact from the get go, and thus contradict your saying that "there's nothing about nonlocality that pro...

dana not sure what issue you are having now but there is nothing about nonlocality that proves any ontological position. that is the science of the matter. see this article by Lee Smolin that discusses nonlocality and quantum gravity https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/space-the-final-...

Physics has no answer for quite a few questions, e.g. the phenomena of entanglement, i.e. instantaneous, apparently acausal interaction at a distance (no matter how great the distance) between particles, which has been confirmed but not explained with any definitive physicalist explication Certainl...

I would say that if a materialist adopts a position of retrocausation, it strongly limits the explanatory power gained from adopting the materialist stance in the first place. I can't predict what a materialist explanation for precognition might consist of but retrocausation, if it exists, would be...