THOUGHT: Material or Immaterial?

On Exoscience some talk has occured with respect to ideas refering to beings originating in other dimensions and other universes, and on the hypothetical existence of multiple universes.

I'd like to explore with you some considerations:

First, it is stated in most Holy Scripture that the Creator brought forth existence out of nothing. To me this seems to be saying that out of pure thought He willed the physical manifestation of the universe and all things therein.

We do not know. However, what we know is that we are thinking creatures and that we have thought. One must first "think" before building, say, a musical instrument. Shapes, forms, images of the instrument are conjured in the mind and then we pass onto the action of making such thoughts and images concrete. Hence, the topic for this post:

WHAT IS "THOUGHT"?
IS IT MATERIAL OR IMMATERIAL?

Does it exist in the universe and simply finds a person through whom it can be expressed? or is it something originating in the person himself?

This topic has profound implications which may shed light on many an idea concerning multiple-universes and aliens originating in other dimensions.

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dumaurier

 

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Assuming that thought is immaterial, we have a few conundrums to resolve.

1) How does the immaterial thought interact with a material mind? How does it get expressed as language, recorded into memory?

2) How does an immaterial thought manage to operate with concepts that are entirely material and can only be produced by a physical brain? For example, words, sentences, paragraphs. For example, chairs, fuels, electricity. For example, shape, spatial extent, time. For example, emotions, perceptions, sensations.

3) Exactly, precisely, unequivocally what is it about thought that makes us even suspect it's immaterial??

4) How come immaterial thought is confined into a single skull and not shared among multiple individuals?

5) How come immaterial thought can be disrupted or affected by material stimuli? For example, distracting sights or sounds, hormones, physical damage to the brain, drugs, or even a counterargument?

6) How come complex thought is impossible without language?

7) How come all human language is founded on the same fundamental grammar? (out of an infinity of possible grammars?) (Search for Noam Chomsky's work for details.)

8) How come the immaterial thought manifests itself only with material humans, and not with material animals?

9) How come we have to <u>learn</u> how to think, which implies training a physical brain to interact with immaterial thought?

10) How come complex thought arises only in humans that have matured among other humans, and are thus privy to social interaction and communication?

There's probably quite a few questions I've neglected to contemplate, but this should be a good start...

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I am; therefore I think.

[This message has been edited by Boris (edited July 16, 1999).]

 

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hi,

First off I must say both, because thought can be in different cases either material or immaterial. I have small question though, You say you read holy scriptures that said that god created with thought, This makes no sense to I for why would organized religion want to give people a chance to think for themselfs, rather than thinking for them.

The bible is mostly fiction, though truths can be found in metaphor

Zygos

 

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Zygos,

If you read my post, you will agree that i did not say that holy scriptures says that "god created with thought." I said that "it is stated in most Holy Scripture that the Creator brought forth existence out of nothing. To me this seems to be saying that out of pure thought He willed the physical manifestation of the universe and all things therein."

So, to me IT SEEMS TO BE SAYING...but i am not affirming that God created with thought. "We do not know" i add at the beginning of my next paragraph. I am simply toying with this interesting idea.


It is true that in the past organized religion hardly gave "people a chance to think for themselves..." Religious leaders have almost always demonstrated an insatiable power over their converts. This tendency seems to be disappearing in the contemporary world, however.

I agree that "truths can be found in metaphor" in the Bible. The problem becomes great when people start to read either the Old or New Testaments literally. These are Holy Books and as such every verse should be understood from a spiritual viewpoint, not a material one.

Thus, Zygos, to get back on track, WHAT IS "THOUGHT"? IS IT MATERIAL OR IMMATERIAL?


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dumaurier

 

hi,

Thought is material through Manifestation, such as the universal being thought about a ball of earth, and it appered as a planet. just as this being thought about the idea of dimensional walls and they became real. but we are just small bits of this being, and even though we create our own realities, it is hard to prove that thought is material because of the boundries of the world(but it is possible).

Yours zygos

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If you judge a book by its cover
You may end up beliving it.

 

One real clear statement we can make is that thinking about anything is done with words.

Without words to describe to yourself what is going on about you, you are instantly transformed into a hungry scared animal.

Words allow humans to "move forward." Language is always growing. New words, metaphors(!), and even languages (DOS)appear to make our lives safe and dominant. We are the flowers, but the Tree of Life, is the unique wiring in our brains that allows us humans to carry-on speech.

 

6) How come complex thought is impossible without language?

It's not...that is complex thought is not possible without language. Metaphors, I think, make this apparent phenomena. Think of a metaphor as a huge buffer. Data poised to relate, when the right series of words come, the scent of a perfume, a yellow wood.

I'll stick to my guns, no existence without consciousness, and no consiousness without language.

For example. Let's say you are walking in the woods by yourself. No one is around for miles. In front of you is your path, and trees, a narrow stream with mossy banks is running along your path on the right. But when the stream comes too close to the path, stones have been cleverly placed just in the right place to keep your feet well above the busy water.

While you are watching your feet, I propose that just behind you is nothing. No being. A chaotic maze of electrons and subatomic particles. No body. No thing. It is you perceiving it that brings the whole universe into being. And when you are no longer, niether is the universe. Just like it was before you were born!

When language starts to run through our brains, that is when the world shapes up. It is the language,the words, that we pass from generation to generation that is life. That gives form to sensations. gives history, and definiton. Color, shape, texture, outline,space. Language (words) is the Tree of Life. We are the flowers.

 

6) How come complex thought is impossible without language?

It's not...that is complex thought is not possible without language. Metaphors, I think, make this apparent phenomena. Think of a metaphor as a huge buffer. Data poised to relate, when the right series of words come, the scent of a perfume, a yellow wood.

I'll stick to my guns, no existence without consciousness, and no consiousness without language.

For example. Let's say you are walking in the woods by yourself. No one is around for miles. In front of you is your path, and trees, a narrow stream with mossy banks is running along your path on the right. But when the stream comes too close to the path, stones have been cleverly placed just in the right place to keep your feet well above the busy water.

While you are watching your feet, I propose that just behind you is nothing. No being. A chaotic maze of electrons and subatomic particles. No body. No thing. It is you perceiving it that brings the whole universe into being. And when you are no longer, niether is the universe. Just like it was before you were born!

When language starts to run through our brains, that is when the world shapes up. It is the language,the words, that we pass from generation to generation that is life. That gives form to sensations. gives history, and definiton. Color, shape, texture, outline,space. Language (words) is the Tree of Life. We are the flowers.

 

Nnno-no-no-no-no...

Language is used to compress complex constellations of ideas into manageable chunks that can be easily manipulated by our limited cognitive machinery. It is in no way used to generate such sensations as shape, color, texture, motion, location, etc. These things one can perceive without help from language, as animals obviously do -- and as human infants must do early in life, if they are to learn what words correspond to what perceptions, actions, or situations.

In fact there have been cases of humans that grew up in the wild, and were permanently incapable of language. However, they were perfectly aware of themselves and their surroundings, and could perform complex problem-solving tasks such as puzzle assembly (as long as these tasks did not involve language, of course).

The point of all this is, that language is learned by sensory perception and inductive generalization -- just as is anything else that we know. It is a skill, and is highly related to other motor skills like walking, typing, or playing basketball (in fact, it uses many of the same brain centers that are used for motor coordination). Given that, the point I was trying to make with number 6) is that complex, or reasoned, thought is inexorably tied to language, which is undoubtedly earthly. Which makes it really puzzling that the process of thought itself should actually be immaterial.

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I am; therefore I think.

[This message has been edited by Boris (edited July 21, 1999).]

 

What do you mean by immaterial and material?
generally, we can think of thought as
being brainwaves. Our minds act as radios,
sending out brainwaves via thought.
Are we no different than radio stations
and if so, that would mean that thought
(in a sense) is material; you could
relate it to the electromagnetic spectrum.

-Dan

 

The point of all this is, that language is learned by sensory perception and inductive
generalization -- just as is anything else that we know. It is a skill, and is highly
related to other motor skills like walking, typing, or playing basketball (in fact, it
uses many of the same brain centers that are used for motor coordination). Given that, the
point I was trying to make with number 6) is that complex, or reasoned, thought is
inexorably tied to language, which is undoubtedly earthly. Which makes it really puzzling
that the process of thought itself should actually be immaterial</p>

Language then is a skill, but without this skill running through our brains. It is a
skill of timing, where the &quot;rules&quot; are held steady and clear in the background...as
you drive those last two steps toward the bucket.&nbsp; The skill has to be taught, passed
on. And the best part for me is that language is growing, and improving. And for the
individual the more they play, the faster they improve, the better they become. But my
point is that without language, without forms having names, there is no consciousness. Our
brains are wired for language, and the more words we have devoured, organized into
meaningful metaphors (so they are easily retrievable), the more conscious we are. Imagine
Shakespeare &quot;making up&quot; all those new words.</p>

For example, Helen Keller. Before she had words(running through her hands &lt;grin&gt; )
to name her sensations she was unconscious of her world.&nbsp; She is brought into
consciousness by being taught the skill of language. If she hadn't of been taught, she
would not have figured it out on her own, and remained unconscious.</p>

Now in our times, I believe, language is freeing even common people from centuries of
paranoid delusional thinking, that robs them of an expanded sense of individuality. For
thousands of years people have been trying to explain &quot;the voice in the
machine.&quot; And many social structures demand like thinking. When I was a boy, many
older folks still read out loud to themselves. </p>

People are persecuted everywhere and through all times for what they
&quot;believe.&quot; When what they &quot;believe&quot; is what they have been taught. Did
you ever hear of a kid who is born to say Russian parents living in Russia, hearing only
Russian, whose first words are in Spanish. Okay, maybe they &quot;sounded like
Spanish,&quot; haha, but they weren't. People believe the strangest things too. And these
beliefs trap them, in a spiral of fear, about their own thinking. It's like a
fundamentalist in any religion would not dare contemplate what a godless universe looks
like. Heck, I can't get them to think about what heaven looks like?</p>
</body>
</html>

 

2+2,
it seems you think a bit like me.
Are you a skeptic like I am about
Alien activity on earth?
what are your views about religion
and science?

-Dan

 

Dan, No I don't think that there are aliens, or ghosts, or spirits. No gods or Prime Movers. No telepathy, no healers by touch. No magic.

Just my opinion.

 

Alright guys and girls, let's add another dimension here. But before i do this, let me give you my opinion on some things...

When we speak of anything "tangible" or "material", this relates to the senses. If you can touch it, it is material; if it can be smelled, seen, heard, tasted, it is material, it is tangible.

Can thought be sensed with the senses? Obviously not. Consequently, thought is NOT material. It is immaterial.

Now for the next question: what is "soul"? How does it tie in with "thought"? THIS, dear friends, is extremely interesting.

A note for 2x2: I can't follow you at all with your especial emphasis and insistence on "words". Dumb people can't speak yet they think and can even become great scientists! So, what is all this about "words"? Words are used as a means of expressing our subjective observation of the universe all about us. However, without words a person could very well continue to observe that same universe. Words are not necessary to do this. But when one has words he can express this observation to others; a book for example, communicates to and with others an author's thoughts. But words are NOT thought.

Having said this, let us all get back on track:

WHAT IS "THOUGHT"?
IS IT MATERIAL OR IMMATERIAL?


Salutations



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dumaurier

 

Dumaurier:

Thought can indeed be perceived. You know when you are engaged in it, don't you? You are perceiving your own internal cognitive state -- it's called introspection. It may not be measuring air pressure waves, but it is certainly measuring your brain's own activity.

Aside from that, thought (or rather, brain activity) can indeed be measured with scientific instruments -- which are only an artificial extension of 'senses'.

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I am; therefore I think.

 

definition--material
related to matter at hand.
thought is an action related to solving/understanding the problem/matter at hand.

 

Nothing much to add:

Thought is a skill, no different than
speech. However, thought is different;
it is a better, more pure form of
communications.

Thought and Speech can be put in relation
to connections to the internet.

a modem (in relation to speech) can only
send a small amount of information
whereras cable modems (in relation to
thought) can send tons of information.

I read that one could teach someone
pilot skills in less than a second
using telepathy versus years of training
in piloting using speech.

-Dan

 

Thought is immaterial.
You cannot fill a cup of thought.
You cannot fill a glass of thought.
It is a process, to be sure, but an immaterial process. This process is a learned one.

Inspiration. What is inspiration? It can't be material for it seems to come from another realm (an immaterial God-knows-where realm). It influences the feelings and conjures up thought thereafter. But inspiration is immaterial.

Thought generates the measureable electrical impulses scientists record from the brain. These impulses come AFTER the thought, not before.

I am sitting here typing and many thoughts go through the mind. Not one of these is material. If my brain's electrical impulses were measured while i was sitting here typing, every impulse recorded would be manifest after the fact, not before. My words are typed after the thought, not before.

When we die, the instrument that permits the process of thinking, the brain, also dies. But does this mean that thoughts perish, too? How can we be sure that thoughts don't originate outside the brain and that the brain is simply a receptor of sorts? Could it be that man bathes in a sea of thought existing without him and that his brain is simply the receptor, and that we "will" to receive the quality of the thoughts that exist all around us? This would imply that outside of our brain, in our environment, there exists many qualities of thoughts which aren't really ours.

These are all wild theories, of course. Imagination is such a strange phenomena, n'est-ce pas?

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dumaurier

 

Evaporation is a process, to be sure. But you cannot fill a glass of evaporation, can you?

"Material", among other things, means "being of physical or worldly nature". There has never been any evidence to suggest that thought is not of a physical nature.

The electrical/magnetic potentials in the brain occur not before, nor after, but <u>during</u> activity. They are the engine noise, if you will -- they signal the fact that the crankshaft is turning and the pistons are firing. They are generated by ion flows across synaptic junctions and axon membranes at the nodes of Ranvier, as well as ion 'sound waves' within myelinated sections of axons and dendrites. The ways in which the ion flows are induced are precisely mapped, and are entirely chemical. Same is true of the effect such currents have on their target cells. The entire loop of brain activity is physical, from sensory input, to internal computation, to behavioral output. Not one phenomenon in the brain has ever been detected to indicate otherwise.

<hr>

Now forgive me if I gloat, but I'd like to raise a few points stemming from your post. I assume that it is in an attempt to postulate or rationalize afterlife that you resort to the 'ocean of thought' theory. If I understand you correctly, you want to believe that the brain learns to perceive thought. I used to muse along the same lines in my tender years, and ended up with more questions than answers, and more nonsense than meaning. Quite a few dauting challenges immediately arise with the assumption of dual existence, which are not present in the materialistic worldview. Here's a sampling:

We assume that the brain learns to perceive and channel thought, and convert it into action. For the time being we also assume that the thought outside the brain is just floating out there, and not a part of any 'soul'. Would it not then mean that the particular way a brain learns to think is therefore peculiar to the brain itself, not to the thought that is permeating the surrounding environment? If so, then your very personality is encoded in the brain, and when your brain dies your personality dies. Which means your memories die, your sensory- and self-awareness die, basically everything you are dies with the brain, and the only thing left is the ocean of thought which happily existed in the same state even before you were born. Hmmm... Not much in the way of afterlife, not to mention lack of any empirical support.

Of course, another curious aspect to this is that thought oftentimes involves things that are inherent in the mundane body -- aches and pains, pleasures and disabilities, sensory concepts (such as loudness, or brightness, or color, or coolness) -- which do not make sense on their own without the reference frame of the human body. So now, we've got a brain that actually contributes new things to the great sea of thought? If so, then what's the point of the great thought ocean, if the brain can very well generate thought on its own?

Now, we assume a more Cartesian picture where a noncorporeal soul is somehow attached to the brain and is experiencing bidirectional feed of information through this physical 'wire'. And we've got problems up the wazoo.

First, where exactly does the soul attach to the body? It's certainly not in the neocortex! People are alive who have lost an entire hemisphere, or were born without it. Is it in the lower brain areas? But those are present even in the most primitive animals -- suggesting that they, too, must be able to think. An even more curious phenomena arise when the main connection between the hemispheres, called Corpus Callosum, is severed -- we get the so-called split-brain patients: people whose right and left brains are cognitively independent in most ways, and often conflict with one another. For example, the case of a split-brain patient trying to beat up his wife with the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) and struggling to restrain himself with the right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere) is a classical illustration of this dual-personality phenomenon. Furthermore, thought is not restricted to any hemisphere. In split-brain patients, both right and left hemispheres can follow directions, solve tasks, and interact with the environment independently, and indeed with no knowledge, from the other hemisphere -- although only the left hemisphere (in right-handers) is able to speak or comprehend speech.

Now, if there is a unifying, singular soul presiding over the body, it must be connected somewhere. It's not in the lower brain. It's not any place in particular in the upper brain. Then the only option we are left with, is that the soul connects itself to the entire brain all at once. But then, why do the right and left hemispheres behave so independently when the main bundle of axonal interconnection fibers between them is severed?

Then there's the rather strange fact that absolutely everything we know is stored in the physical brain. Destroying portions of the brain once it has had a chance to learn something wipes out bits of memory. That would mean that when you die, even if the soul survives you loose all memory you ever accumulated and all lessons you've ever learned in you lifetime. So much for reincarnation! But if memories are somehow transferred from the brain into the soul, why is it that they are <u>permanently</u> lost when the brain is lesioned; why don't they come back as the brain recuperates? Why is it that thought can flow from the soul to the brain, but not knowledge (especially bizzarre, since the two are intimately interconnected!). How come the soul must rely on the brain's memory to generate thought, and not on its own??? And if it can only utilize the brain's knowledge, then again what's the point of reincarnation, since you'd never get any wiser!

Then of course there is a problem of soul deluge. The population of the Earth is growing; where are all the new souls coming from? And where are they all going, in increasing numbers? There'll be 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, and probably over a trillion in a few centuries. The population can theoretically grow without bound -- into quadrillions, quintillions, and so on, fanning out all over the Milky Way and who knows, maybe even beyond. What's happening here?

Then there's an issue of just when a soul attaches to the body and just when it departs.

Then there is a very obvious issue of measurement. The brain consists entirely of well-understood substances with well-understood behaviors. If the soul can interact with the brain matter, it should similarly interact with measuring instruments that share some of the same properties. Never, ever, has any interaction between a soul and a measuring instrument been demonstrated.

Not to mention the far too obvious lack of any experimental method to even hint at the existence of souls. And not to mention the far too obvious paralleles between the brain and other artificial information-processing systems.

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I am; therefore I think.

 

THE EXISTENCE OF THE RATIONAL SOUL
AFTER THE DEATH OF THE BODY

Some think that the body is the substance and exists by itself, and that the spirit is accidental and depends upon the substance of the body, although, on the contrary, the rational soul is the substance, and the body depends upon it. If the accident--that is to say, the body--be destroyed, the substance, the spirit, remains.

Second, the rational soul, meaning the human spirit, does not descend into the body--that is to say, it does not enter it, for descent and entrance are characteristics of bodies, and the rational soul is exempt from this. The spirit never entered this body, so in quitting it, it will not be in need of an abiding-place: no, the spirit is connected with the body, as this light is with this mirror. When the mirror is clear and perfect, the light of the lamp will be apparent in it, and when the mirror becomes covered with dust or breaks, the light will disappear.

The rational soul--that is to say, the human spirit-- has neither entered this body nor existed through it; so after the disintegration of the composition of the body, how should it be in need of a substance through which it may exist? On the contrary, the rational soul is the substance through which the body exists. The personality of the rational soul is from its beginning; it is not due to the instrumentality of the body, but the state and the personality of the rational soul may be strengthened in this world; it will make progress and will attain to the degrees of perfection, or it will remain in the lowest abyss of ignorance, veiled and deprived from beholding the signs of God.

(`Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, pp. 239-40)


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dumaurier