Comments on: Rrrrroar

By: Wrinkels

Wrinkels — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:22:40 +0000

Your mistake regarding the physical changing the mental (the way people think) is elementary… Your mistake is in implicitly assuming that the chemical is a physical thing. Look at it this way, instead of being a physical chemical which is influencing the brain (soul, spirit, whatever) why not assert that the caffeine is also of a mental nature? In any event, you can not prove to me that caffeine is a physical thing (I dare you to try . I would reply that caffeine is a thought, a concept, a purely mental constuction…

By: kenny

kenny — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 04:11:41 +0000

whoops! here you go – http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/Personal/steane/qcintro.html

By: kenny

kenny — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 04:08:25 +0000

just reminded me of a quote i read in this intro to quantum computing
“The rallying cry of the information physicist is ‘no information without physical representation!’”
cheers!
kenny

By: tom

tom — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 17:28:44 +0000

// add some chemicals and you can alter how and what someone thinks //
One thing that people don’t seem to emphasised so much when talking about the whole mind-is-physical thing is that it goes both ways. Yes, if you take a drug and alter your brain chemistry you will have a different conscious experience, but also, if you have a different conscious experience for some other reason (some internal dynamic, some social experience, whatever) that is altering your brain chemistry…The mind is not some puppet played by the brain, a brain which possesses the controlling force of physical reality…Mind and brain exist on the same level – they are co-dependent (although necessarily we experience them differently because we see one from the inside!).