No doubt. That elasticity doesn't really explain how someone with half a brain continues to be the person they were when they had a full brain. Elasticity, as explanation, doesn't cut the mustard. But, you know this.
It actually does cut the mustard. Like I said, the brain is quite adaptable when it comes to changes in it. But people without half a brain don't continue to be the person they were, there are changes in how they can process information around them. There are also numerous instances of people changing completely due to brain damage, tumors, etc. Even drugs and alcohol can do the same. Again the research bears this out.
One who pays attention to what's actually going on in the wholly on-the-ground-not-up-in-the-clouds research knows tumors to brain diseases often have devastating physical effects but none at all on the coherence and continuity of the I behind the eyes.
Stella's dementia is confusing and frustrating for her becuz she, the person, the mind, the I, is trapped in it. Stella hasn't become a different person, only a trapped one who acts accordingly.
Joe's brain tumor affects his sight, his mobility, his continence. He's angry about it. He's trapped, not changed.
Lucinda's Tourettes embarrasses her. The tics, the vocalizations, trap her, not turn her into a different person.
The topper is Phineas P. Gage. A large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe. Supposedly the injury effected his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life. Gage is often held up as an evidence mind is brain product.
How else can you explain his personality change, Henry?
I reckon having a disfiguring, debilitating injury would sour me too. I wouldn't be a different person, just an awfully disgruntled one.
There is no person trapped by the dementia, that person doesn't exist anymore. Again they are trying to reference some kind of "I" or "mind" that doesn't exist and they have no evidence for. Someone with dementia isn't trapped in it, there is no soul watching this all unfold. No ghost in the machine. With the brain tumor he's not trapped, and as I said people can "become different people" if they have a brain tumor. Same with Tourretes.
They like to think a brain injury wouldn't change them, but it most definitely would. Because, again, you are the brain. So far we have no evidence of people functioning without one.
And Penfield said hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, once in a while, putting an electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought. He never, ever did. So he said that the obvious explanation for that is that abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.
Citing a dated neuroscientist doesn't make your case, the field has advanced leaps since him. But to beat a dead horse, "it's not that simple".
But Penfield noted that, in probably hundreds of thousands of different individual stimulations, he never once stimulated the power of reason. He never stimulated the intellect. He never stimulated a person to do calculus or to think of an abstract concept like justice or mercy.
All the stimulations were concrete things: Move your arm or feel a tingling or even a concrete memory, like you remember your grandmother’s face or something. But there was never any abstract thought stimulated.
And Penfield said hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, once in a while, putting an electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought. He never, ever did. So he said that the obvious explanation for that is that abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.
The other line of reasoning that he had, which is kind of related to this, is that, since he was a pioneer in the treatment of epilepsy, not only did he study the surgical manifestations of epilepsy but he also studied the presentation of seizures that people would have in their everyday life. So he studied hundreds of thousands of seizures that people had and he never found any seizure that had intellectual content. Seizures never involved abstract reasoning.
When people have seizures, sometimes they have a generalized seizure. Sometimes they just fall on the ground and go unconscious. Or sometimes they’ll have what’s called a focal seizure where they’ll have a twitching of a finger or a twitching of a limb or they’ll have tingling feeling, the same kind of things that he got when he stimulated the surface of the brain. But nobody ever had a calculus seizure. Nobody ever have a seizure where they couldn’t stop doing arithmetic. Or couldn’t stop doing logic.
And he said, why is that? If arithmetic and logic and all that abstract thought come from the brain, every once in a while you ought to get a seizure that makes it happen. So he asked rhetorically, why are there no intellectual seizures? His answer was, because the intellect doesn’t come from the brain.
His third line of reasoning was the following: He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm.
And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference.
The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always know if they did it or if he did it.
So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.
So he had three lines of evidence: His inability to stimulate intellectual thought, the inability of seizures to cause intellectual thought, and his inability to stimulate the will. … So he concluded that the intellect and the will are not from the brain. - Michael Egnor
Never mind that asking people whether they were tricked or not is poor methodology, it was clear that the brain is responsible for making their arms move. You could make the argument that they were saying which time they chose to and which time he poked them, but neither one shows a mind. So wrong again. Again, dated neuroscientist, means nothing.
The will is most certainly a function of the brain though, assuming there is such a thing as the will. I could cite how cults did use drugs to influence and manipulate people during the 60's or how alcohol makes people more compliant, etc. Again, wrong.
And obviously a seizure is a physical thing, that's what they are, to call something an arithmetic or logic seizure is just nonsense and proves nothing. His reasoning is flawed though. Not to mention you can't measure an arithmetic or logic seizure in a lab, but also saying that ever once in a while you get a seizure that should make it happen is stupid. Only about 1.2 percent of the population gets them. But again, dude is old in terms of scientific knowledge and the research has advanced years since his time. We've shown him to be wrong, the intellect is a function of the brain.
But again this is a "god of the gaps". I don't know therefor mind.
Of course not. You say It’s a combination of different functions and areas in concert and “I”ness is also a product of the brain. Please, explain these functions and areas: what they are and how they interact.
I can say that meditators show this. When studied they have reduced bloodflow to the area of the brain that is responsible for the boundaries between your body and the world, dissolving that sense of "I"ness. We are also able to replicate this with drugs and stimulating that area with magnets.
So is promissory materialism.
We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science. -John C. Eccles
Literally how science works. The amount of people who take "we don't know therefor god" as an argument is frankly tragic. Science accepts it doesn't know everything and the point is to get there, but people take that to mean that they can horn in what they want. Doesn't change you have no evidence of mind.
I know John Eccles, a tragic example of Nobel disease. Guy makes a significant contribution and then devolves to crankery. Again, dated neuroscientists, the field is way beyond them now. Nevermind that just quoting the dude means nothing. The more we learn about the brain the less reason there is to suspect a mind, that's the trend so far. Dualists just hide behind consciousness being hard to solve because they've lost everything else.
