bahman wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 9:49 pm
Conde Lucanor wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 8:52 pm
bahman wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 11:15 pm
Can you control your synapse?
Since when "control" (or lack of it) of the behavior of the electrons in my biological organism has anything to do with the relevance of consciousness to materialism. The cells from the central nervous system do their work and conscious experience is produced. What are we supposedly missing?
What you are missing is the question that I asked. Can you control any part of the tissue of your brain by your thought? Yes, or no?
The brain tissue is no more controllable than the heart tissue, the liver tissue, the stomach tissue or the bone tissue, so it is quite irrelevant whether one can control it or not. What is important, though, is that neurons do control our sensory-motor system, which allows that we move parts of our body by commands issued with our thoughts: to raise a hand, I think about it, my central nervous system sends the signal to the arm muscles and voila, my hand is raised. Not only that, conscious activity that one performs will be made visible as brain activity in many functional neuroimaging techniques, even if one just thinks about the activity, without performing it.
bahman wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 9:49 pm
Then you don't understand the question that I asked. If matter behaves correctly according to the laws of nature then how the mind can intervene.
You start from the wrong, dualistic assumption that "mind" is one thing different than nature. Mind is natural, it is the product of nature, it doesn't appear out of nowhere as a supernatural force to intervene in natural processes.
bahman wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 9:49 pmNo need to say that to cause you to need to create energy. How else could you affect the matter? How thought can create energy?
Who says thought needs to affect matter or whatever? Thought is a process performed by material beings.
bahman wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 9:49 pm
Conde Lucanor wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 8:52 pm
bahman wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 11:15 pm
I am saying that the properties of the substance water are a function of the properties of the electrons and the nucleus. You could even simulate the molecule of water these days.
But saying that the properties of water are a function of the properties of its constitutive elements does not equate saying that the properties of water are the simple mereological sum of the properties of its constitutive elements. Clearly, hydrogen substance has some properties and oxygen as well, but water has other different properties not found in those substances, considered alone. I challenge you to never drink water again, just assimilate hydrogen and oxygen separately (actually this is a complementary therapy), and then tell me (when you're still alive) how it goes. Or drink hydrogen peroxide, instead, and we''ll see if the properties of hydrogen and gas have the same effect on you as water.
Hydrogen and oxygen are not elementary particles. The right expression is that the properties of water are a function of the properties of its constituents, electrons, nucleus.
There are around 30 known elementary particles, but there are known around 118 pure chemical elements, which can not be broken down to another chemical substance, and all of them have particular physical properties. Many of these pure substances can be combined to form compound substances that display very different properties than those of the pure substances. And the composite result is not the sum of the properties of the elementary substances, and one cannot say that the properties of water are the properties of its elementary constituents, even though they were a function of them. If you digest chlorine you get poisoned and die, but if you combine chlorine with sodium, you have salt to put in your food and have a delicious meal.