Mind or matter?

[Rose]

This is a huge thing in philosophy and I figured it would be a good question to ask? Are the mind and body separate or are they both just matter?

[Neo Angelo]

Damn thats a great first topic. Ummm my thought is matter on both ends. opinions anyone

[Ebo]

We are sure that we can perceive and are self-aware, and that's all mind is, but how can consciousness and self-awareness come from our statndard definition of matter, something we know is outside the realm of self-awareness? Is what we think we know as mind the constructor of what we think we know as matter or is what we think we know as matter the constructor of what we think we know as mind?

[Hades.]

Gah, quantum. ;- ;

Anyway, that's really interesting. In terms of mind, where the mind is placed can be considered matter, but then again, it's so powerful, misleading, confusing and unfathomable that... well... I think you can figure out where I might go with this. How can we ever know?

[Rose]

See the argument for matter is the mind is just a bunch of electrical impulses and the other is that the mind is made of something completely different from the body. Matter explains how it exists in our world and the Principal of Conservation of Energy while mind explains other things such as emotions and other things like that.

[Hades.]

Not physically able to grasp but more like some transparent or invisible matter, nay? I see how Neo says that at both ends they still might be matter, but how can we truly know that what we perceive and believe as mind different from the body is just a result of what the matter does to the mind?

[Neo Angelo]

Very good point Fallen in fact it goes with my argument. Now you can say that this is a ridiculous argument just know I used this argument in my philosophy class and it scored me an A on the Exam. "If the immaterial mind truly controls what we perceive as the material minds doing Ex. thoughts emotions memory etc. Then why is it when i think very hard on a subject my head begins to hurt which is the very place the material mind lays in the body. If what we perceive as the material mind is not what is truly doing the thinking on the subject then why is there pain at all where the material mind lies. Should i be feeling any pain if there truly exists an immaterial mind."

A counter argument will be much apprieciated.

[Ebo]

Cool, I don't think that I've heard anything like that before, but I sort of don't understand where you're going with it or what you really mean so excuse me if I somehow misunderstood. So... you're basically asking "If my thought controls what I think of as my brain's products, such as my thought... then why is it that when I think hard, the place where the brain lies in my body begins to hurt?" If my thought controls my thought, why do I feel pain? The answer is simple and sounds just as crazy: you think you feel pain, and this is sort of what science says. I remember one time, I had a huge gash on my hand and another cut on my arm and didn't even realize it or feel even one bit of pain until I actually looked at it, which caused the act of perceiving and thinking of knowing, which is the act of thinking. Pain doesn't come from the body to begin with; pain is a product of the mind. I'm not saying that I could have not felt the pain if I tried hard enough and I doubt many people could, but if I had taken powerful enough drugs, maybe I wouldn't have felt as bad. These drugs do not go to where we think the pain is because there is no pain where the pain is; in other words, all pain is an illusion if you think that the place is hurting is really the reason why its hurting. The drugs go to the brain because that's where all types of pain come from. The drugs go to nerves because they are an extension of the brain. The drugs do not go to the pain or wound because there really is no pain because pain is not a material thing, but at the same time there is pain because we experience it. So, then, how does something that does not exist exist? Does this sound like anything familiar? Like a non-material mind? It's funny though, since the material brain lacks the ability to feel pain, but it is the benefactor of all pain. Like how there's no proof for god, but god is the proof for all, there's no proof for a material brain, but the brain creates everything for us. In other words, what we experience as our world is created by thought. From what we think is nothing is everything we think we know in our world. This also connects to quantum mechanics: from something that isn't material comes what we think is material; from what we think are pieces are really relations of an indivisible whole, and this is the nature of all. In any case, we still have pain and suffering because we think we have material minds and bodies and from there we think we feel pain... we have no choice but to assume and not assume we assume because if we don't we will suffer; fully letting go of this concept requires what we think of as death, because in death the world created by the inescapable, escapable reality of a pseudoreality of our non-sensing senses from our non-thinking, thinking brain created from non-material material will be nuked.

[Neo Angelo]

i messed up the explanation sorry. i 4got to mention that someone in the dark ages stated "the immaterial mind is the only mind and what lies in our heads is truly nothing it has no function what so ever". Sorry i dont remember the name of the person and i sold my book. but i really like your argument though my hat is off to you. So the point of my argument was "if what lies inside my head is truly nothing y does it hurt just because i think, if the immaterial mind is doing the thinking y do i feel pain in that specific area of my body."

[Rose]

I like it...

I think what lies in our mind is not nothing but when you think your head hurts is just like anything else you do. If you run then your legs and feet hurt. If you are lifting then your arms hurt. so if you thinking which is what a brain does then shouldn't it hurt? Is that what you're trying to say?

[Neo Angelo]

yes exactly. sorry i couldnt put it very simply im an rookie at the game. but yes that is my current argument on the subject if thinking makes my head hurt just like lifting weights makes my arms hurt then it must be matter. Any thoughts?

[Ebo]

I dunno, it's kinda hard for me to picture because I don't think that thinking or even thinking about thinking or thinking about thinking about thinking has made my brain hurt. I don't know anything much so don't take my word for this, but when the brain is active and you're trying hard to gain something, like knowledge, you are stressed and more blood flow is needed in certain areas and certain vessels act differently, so yeah the head could hurt, and if it goes on for long enough, the entire body could be hurt too.
You use the word "head" and not "brain." The brain is in the head, but the material brain cannot hurt. You can think that your head can hurt, but your brain cannot hurt. The brain itself has no nociceptors; it is pain insensitive. However, what happens in the brain can cause severe pain to the head and pain and damage all over the body. There's no such thing as pain in the way that we can put pain in a cup and measure it; we can only feel it. The only place where pain comes from is the brain, but the brain itself can't have pain. People can drill a hole in someone's brain without the person even feeling pain. Pain only exists because we are forced to believe that it exists; the brain forces it on us, like how the brain forces our collective perception of what we think of as a material world on us. So I guess you can say that the brain is somewhat of a deceived deceiver. The truth may be that we are all born slaves to our own personal and collective deceptions, which are born by a will to limit information and produced by a nonentity, ourselves, perhaps only to remain amused. Then again, I may be 100% wrong, but I'd still be right.

BTW, crudely put, what I've been arguing the whole time is that the mind is everything, and everything is nothing while being something and something while being nothing.

[Jeiku]

In other words, "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, I'm just tossing vague concepts around" :3
And to remain relevant..Let me first clear up that I really have no opinion on this subject because I simply believe at the moment that it is impossible to truly know if mind and matter are separate or the same. So for the sake of argument I'd like to pose a question..Why is it that when the brain (matter) is damaged, the mind also seems to take on some form of damage? This would surely be a strong point for those who believe mind and matter are the same.

[Ebo]

Yeah, exactly. -_- Jaku, I'd love it if you put a bullet through my head so I could know, but like you said, that's no guarantee and we still wouldn't know for sure, but is that an excuse to not to try to know? What we see as changes on the brain or its existence (physical health) or nonexistence (physical damage or decay into not being a brain) may not have any effect on consciousness itself in terms of existing or not, but they may hamper it and may have some effect on the senses and on the ability of consciousness to express and know itself on a human scale. If our brains were designed in a different way, the world around us would be wholly different.
There's no way to be sure if we ever fully lose consciousness or self awareness. I've heard somewhere that we always dream because without entering the REM state for a long time our bodies cannot function, but most of the time we can't even remember dreams we've had. People who wake up from comas usually remember things and knew what was happening around them, but just couldn't do anything at all. Sometimes we forget things to protect ourselves. Perhaps its safe to say that the the mind sometimes can't express itself in a damaged body or the maybe the body can live without any consciousness, but in a case like that it would no longer be a human. We can keep bodies alive via machines, but it doesn't always mean that they are still human beings and not just living tissue.
How do we get mind from matter? How do we get awareness out of matter and energy, the seeming measurable finite, when the system used to define them comes from or is mind alone? If the skyscraper is here and if utterly no one or nothing knew about it, then there can't be a skyscraper. Whatever created it couldn't have created it because there's no one or nothing to be aware of it or make it, aka the skyscraper doesn't exist. If it's there by chance, how can the system of chance be there by chance? And even so, even chance is based on cause and effect, because if a skyscraper is there by chance or not, information about the skyscraper at one point should also somehow influence the state of the skyscraper at another point in time, and if this is true then the skyscraper couldn't have been there forever, but if it wasn't there forever someone had to design and build it. If there is no form of awareness, there could be no thing to build it and therefore the thing that we know as a skyscraper could not exist. The skyscraper does exist; clearly something built it, or enabled us to make us think we built it. The skyscraper exists because we think it exists because we think we sense it; the very act of thinking that it exists confirms it, but the real question now is to what degree it exists. Mind can be seen as the synecdochical representation of what we call god.

[Hades.]

I agree, but still have my full doubts. I mean, what Ebola said is quite right. The body perceives whenever the body KNOWS what exactly it's perceiving. In other words, if you pinch someone and you watch or are conscious of what happened, then you can feel the sting of the action caused to your body. If you're completely unaware and or even subconsciously perceive it, you don't feel nor even notice what happened to your body.