Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Consul]

I found 210 publications from professor John Lorber on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?te ... BAuthor%5D

It appears to be evident that he is a non-controversial specialist.

No, he seems to have been a controversial specialist (he died in 1996):

QUOTE>
"Before his death in 1996, Lorber, who had a reputation for being deliberately controversial, conceded that he had perhaps over dramatised his evidence, arguing that this needed to be done in order to get people to listen. He believed that far too often results that don’t fit existing explanations are marginalised as ‘anomalous’ results (Lewin, 1980)."

(Rolls, Geoff. Classic Case Studies in Psychology. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. p. 273)
<QUOTE

Based on this information, his statement that the student with an IQ of 126 was estimated to have an amount of brain tissue weighing between 50-150 grams appears to deserve credibility.

"I can't say whether the mathematics student with an IQ of 126 had a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it is clear it is nowhere near the normal 1.5kg and much of the brain he does have is in the more primitive deep structures that are relatively spared in hydrochephalus".

It may also imply something about the case of the French man. It is merely suggested that his brain is compressed. I have seen no evidence for that idea while the expert information from professor John Lorber suggests that brain weight is reduced to 5% of the original weight.

What is the basis for that idea? Is there evidence that a normal brain can compress to 5% size? What about the many parts such as the cerebellum, frontal lobe, temperal lobe, pons, medulla, latteral ventricles, hypothalamus, corpus callosum, central sulcus, prietal lobe, thalamus, occipital lobe, cerebellar cortex, etc.? Are they included in a compressed size and in a different shape?

I'm sorry, but if you want to learn more, you need to consult the scientific texts dealing with this issue, because I know much too little about it. But what I do know is that there isn't one case of a conscious person who is completely brainless.

[Terrapin Station]

A recent study suggests that all identical particles in the Universe are entangled by their identical nature.

What, specifically, in that article do you take to be a support for the claim (rather than just an assumption that the claim is coherent and is the case) that there are numerically distinct but somehow identical particles?

[Gee]

Some appear to be functioning normally with an above average IQ (the average in the US is 98) and are capable of achieving an academic degree with just 5% brain tissue. On what basis would you assume that the mentioned people are not capable of philosophy and perhaps unique and exceptional insights?

You have failed to move the premise of the thread one inch.
You have not given a single example of consciousness without a brain. Each example you have given includes evidence of people with brains, under difficult and unusual circumstances where the they have suffered greatly due to their deformity.
No where have you given an example of any conscious activity in the absence of brain tissue.
Thus the entire thread is a verbal masturbation.

I think that arjand's point was that a brain is not required for there to be consciousness, and he is correct. The idea that consciousness comes from the brain is kind of silly as all plant life is conscious and none of it has a brain.

It may be necessary to have a brain in order to experience and process thoughts. That is worth discussing. It may be necessary to have a brain in order to experience emotion, rather than just sensation. That is also worth discussing.

Gee

[LuckyR]

When you look at the cited article, the guy with the CT scans has an IQ of 75, which used to be called feeblemindedness and is one point awsy from being a moron. I guess brains are important after all...

I do not agree. For example, some top performing music artists and TV stars have not completed lower level education and have a low IQ (~100) while their performance in life (their talent) cannot be matched by many people.

Emotional intelligence is something very different from IQ and I do not believe that it is of lesser value. It is known that processing social relations requires the most brain processing power so in a way, completing a math degree may be a lesser sign of intelligence than performing as a music artist.

Beethoven once said: "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.".

Is a musician with a low IQ low intelligent? Perhaps the IQ score is not a valid perspective on intelligence per se.

It is widely known that the IQ score can differ by as much as 20 points at different moments in time. For example, when one is deeply in love the score could be higher than when one is depressed.

No, Your IQ Is Not Constant
For any given individual, the change in IQ score changed from -20 to +23 for verbal IQ and -28- to +17 for non-verbal IQ.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/bl ... t-constant

On a blog I read the following:

The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing.

Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

I would share this perspective. Similar to the proposition by Jabob Barnett that any normal child can become a genius by "thinking differently" (TED talk), the fact that people manage to live a normal life with merely 5% brain tissue may be indicative of what potential could lay in using 100% brain tissue in the most optimal way.

What don't you agree with? That a guy that lost 90% of his white matter is one point away from being a moron? It was your article that pointed that out. What is newsworthy about a guy with only 10% of his brain being in the bottom 7% of standardized measures of intelligence? Your post supports the notion that brains are necessary for intelligence. Not proof but definitely not in support of the counter argument.

[Steve3007]

Oy vey. ... I think, as a rule ...

There's no way I'm about to start reading every post on the board, or even every post in a thread I'm responding to, especially given the rambling, sometimes barely-coherent logorrhea that many folks are prone to.

In general, one shouldn't assume that I've read anything other than what I've quoted.

Fair point. My "oy vey" and the subsequent rant is cheerfully withdrawn.

[Terrapin Station]

all plant life is conscious

[Sculptor1]

You have failed to move the premise of the thread one inch.
You have not given a single example of consciousness without a brain. Each example you have given includes evidence of people with brains, under difficult and unusual circumstances where the they have suffered greatly due to their deformity.
No where have you given an example of any conscious activity in the absence of brain tissue.
Thus the entire thread is a verbal masturbation.

I think that arjand's point was that a brain is not required for there to be consciousness, and he is correct.

False. And nothing he has offered supports that.

The idea that consciousness comes from the brain is kind of silly as all plant life is conscious and none of it has a brain.

No plant life is conscious.

It may be necessary to have a brain in order to experience and process thoughts. That is worth discussing. It may be necessary to have a brain in order to experience emotion, rather than just sensation. That is also worth discussing.

Gee

[Atla]

I'll put it as simply as I can. Denying the Hard problem is not a choice or philosophical option or whatever, but a form of insanity.

You can't even grasp what the Hard problem is, Dennett seems to be capable of doing that though.

[Terrapin Station]

You can't even grasp what the Hard problem is, Dennett seems to be capable of doing that though.

No wonder it's useless attempting a conversation with you.

[Faustus5]

I'll put it as simply as I can. Denying the Hard problem is not a choice or philosophical option or whatever, but a form of insanity.
Dennett is either mentally ill or dishonest. Making other people insane as well is not good for humanity at larger.

Then either a lot of respected philosophers with solid careers are insane, or a poster on an internet forum is deep in the grip of an ideology and probably hasn't been reading enough from the philosophers he/she disagrees with to understand what they believe and why.

Gee, which is more likely?

[Faustus5]

As I said, phenomenal conscious experience doesn't look accessible to our current materialist scientific toolkit.

It sure looks like it is to me.

[Gee]

all plant life is conscious

I love the picture, so I will break this down simply.

1. Many millennia ago God created everything, then created man in his image, so only man had a soul (consciousness).

2. Centuries ago, man outgrew God and decided that he created himself, but he still had a soul (consciousness) as it was necessary for human rights.

3. Then man discovered evolution, which confirmed that God was not necessary, but left the problem of where the soul came from, as we still believed in it. We decided on the brain.

4. Then science discovered that other species have brains that work somewhat like ours. So we invented a kind of reverse evolution where we assume consciousness is possible if another specie's brain is close enough to ours, but we are not willing to admit that other species might have souls.

5. So consciousness either was given to us by God, or it magically evolved in the human specie and then reverse engineered itself back to species with similar brains. Therefore plants could not possibly be conscious.

Is this close to your thinking?

In reality, science has discovered that plants are aware, conscious, of themselves, their environment, and others of their specie. They do not have brains.

Gee

[Gee]

The idea that consciousness comes from the brain is kind of silly as all plant life is conscious and none of it has a brain.

No plant life is conscious.

My sincere apologies. I did not realize you were religious.

Gee

[Steve3007]

...specie...

It's strange, the things that jog the memory. Have I asked you about your unusual singularization of the word "species" before? I remember asking another person, and commenting to them that there was one other person here who also used it.

viewtopic.php?p=184762#p184762

[Terrapin Station]

I love the picture, so I will break this down simply.

1. Many millennia ago God created everything, then created man in his image, so only man had a soul (consciousness).

2. Centuries ago, man outgrew God and decided that he created himself, but he still had a soul (consciousness) as it was necessary for human rights.

3. Then man discovered evolution, which confirmed that God was not necessary, but left the problem of where the soul came from, as we still believed in it. We decided on the brain.

4. Then science discovered that other species have brains that work somewhat like ours. So we invented a kind of reverse evolution where we assume consciousness is possible if another specie's brain is close enough to ours, but we are not willing to admit that other species might have souls.

5. So consciousness either was given to us by God, or it magically evolved in the human specie and then reverse engineered itself back to species with similar brains. Therefore plants could not possibly be conscious.

Is this close to your thinking?

In reality, science has discovered that plants are aware, conscious, of themselves, their environment, and others of their specie. They do not have brains.

Gee

I'm an atheist. I don't believe in "souls."

Consciousness isn't something "magical." It's simply a property of certain materials, in certain structures, undergoing certain processes. We know for sure that human brains are the right sorts of materials/structures/processes for those properties. We can be pretty sure that very similar brains are going to be the right sorts of materials/structures/processes, too. We just don't know how different brains can be for consciousness to still obtain. But there's no good reason to believe that very different sorts of materials/structures/processes would amount to conscious properties.