You are the king of surrender. The second anything looks the slightest bit difficult, you are like "I give up! Help me Jesus!" It is complicated (probably the most complicated thing in the universe), but it is also understandable. And the understanding is demonstrated in control. We can make you content with Prozac, concentrative with Ritalin, awake with Provigil, and sleepy with Zolpidem. We can make you remember things that never happened and forget memories forever. We can learn what kinds of things stick in the brain, and create political campaign strategies that take advantage of them. People are meat puppets, and we have just started learning where some of the strings are.
Tell me why it's rubbish then. Give an opposing argument if you can. Of course we don't know how all the intricate processes in the body and the brain works. So what? Did I say we did and how does that affect my point? What are you on about? Do you not think electrons and protons influence biological reactions? Are these not sub-atomic particles? Again........eh?
there is such a vast difference between saying that someone is a robot and saying that people can be influenced -- perhaps manipulated -- thru schemes and devices that tap into unconscious processes. but your example of psychotropic drugs is patently a non-sequitur. if you have to put drugs into a persons body to change the way they respond to external or internal stimuli, that doesn't vaguely suggest robotics. if you have to hypnotize someone so that they create false memories, that is nothing like pulling strings on someone who has an independent will. you need to believe the way you do because your worship of what you think is science forces you to subjugate everything to naturalistic mechanisms. "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy...rest, rest, perturbed spirit."
you made a claim...didn't back it up with anything other than your empty opinion. no, but stars do. quarks, sir...quarks
Although, as an orgainsm, we are living creatures, every constituent part which makes us up is non-living. There is absolutely no evidence of any kind of 'magic' component which makes us different from non-living matter - like a soul. The only things which affect our bodies and brains are the same chemical reactions which affect every other piece of matter in the universe. That means that the only difference between a human being, a spider, a rock or even an actual robot constructed by human beings is the complexity of the interacting, small scale reactions which influence the macroscopic behaviour of the organism or object. The number of variables which affect the behaviour of humans is vast and give the illusion that humans (and other animals) are somehow different and not just totally instictive things which are utterly controlled by simple 'sensor-reaction-response' mechanisms...but we are. Is that good enough? Can you find anything in there to argue against?
Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A slight bit of paraphrasing could make it apply in this instance.
Why? I'll admit that there is somewhat of a difference, but it is hardly vast. The same way that I can program my computer to play only Led Zeppelin tracks from my music library and then change said programming to Frank Sinatra, we can program a person who is normally depressed to be happy, simply by introducing a drug or hypnotic suggestion. The human brain is a complex environment of chemical interactions and processes (some of which we do not yet completely understand), that can be manipulated just as your cellphone or iMac can. If you're only point of contention is that we are autonomous while even the most advanced robots and computers are not (at least not to the same degree), then you're nitpicking a bit too much. Can you give us an example of a process within the brain that we currently understand that is not a naturalistic mechanism, or can you only claim that what we do not yet understand must be supernatural and therefor attributed to a god?
if you introduce a chemical substance into a person's body to mollify the symptoms of bi-polar disorder, you haven't changed who the person is, just how the person reacts to stimuli. further, some people become homicidal or suicidal when they take certain psychotropic drugs that are designed to alleviate "depression". the use of such chemical is far from a formula and calling it something akin to programming is a gross misuse of the term, since a program can predict outcomes with near perfect success. i don't think you can hypnotize someone who doesn't wish to be happy and make them happy. we only vaguely understand how memory works and we aren't any better at comprehending how intelligence works. we are certain that people are more intelligent than spiders, but we don't know whether they are more or less intelligent than dolphins because we cannot adequately test the intelligence of dolphins. talking about brain function is a dead end. the key is "process within the brain that we currently understand". and i wasn't attributing anything to a god. i was challenging the idea that people are meat puppets.
sorry. been busy about other things. the only difference between a human and a rock is that a rock feels no pain. you don't understand the word "instinctive" the same way i do, so it would be difficult to discuss that concept. humans have almost no true instincts, as i understand the term. when you use the word "complexity" please remember that the human brain has almost as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. the human brain can create thought independent of any known stimulus. it is self-starting. because of the amount of normal brain activity, you can only postulate that my immediate thoughts about Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin were spurred by something external. we don't know whether there is any other creature in this world or elsewhere that does that.
Well if we're using our own definitions of the word 'instinct', it doesn't make much sense to argue over it. I don't see how it affects my point though. That's exactly what I meant by using that term. That's the reason that we're under the illusion that we're not just meat robots. Well that depends on what you call 'independent'. A brain has to be connected to he living organism to work. Effectively, it's always switched on when it's in a live human. I still don't see why this goes against seeing humans as robots. No it's not. That doesn't make any sense though. Why would anybody argue that their thoughts about a different individual would be influenced 100% by their brain, internally? The fact that you know their names proves that you have external knowledge of them. Again though, in the context of this discussion so what? Does what?
What defines "who a person is" and how do you quantify the change in "who a person is"? We don't know everything about how the brain works though, that's why we can't control it functions 100%. I don't think you can hypnotize someone at all. I don't understand how any of that's relevant.
The problem with our brain is that we might never fully understand it. Evolution produces great results, but not necessarily ones that are easy to understand. I've read about a great example that's sort of an analogy a couple of years ago: Electronic engineer Thompson wondered what would happen if you used an evolutionary algorithm approach on an electronic circuit. Decide on some task, randomly cross-breed circuits that might or might not solve it, keep the ones that do better than the rest, and repeat for as many generations as it takes. Most electric engineers, thinking about such a project, will quickly realize that it's silly to use genuine circuits. Instead, you can simulate the circuits on a computer (since you know exactly how a circuit behaves) and do the whole job more quickly and more cheaply in simulation. Thompson however used a microchip containing 100 tiny transistorized logic cells whose connections can be changed by loading new instructions into the chip's configuration memory. Those instructions are analogous to an organism's DNA code, and can be cross-bred. That's what Thompson did. He tried to produce a circuit that could distinguish two different input signals of different frequency, 1 kilohertz and 10 kilohertz. The result was astonishing. After 4100 generations, it fully worked and what was so fascinating was that nobody understood how or why it worked. The human engineer's solution would have been comprehensible. For example. it would include a "clock" - a circuit that ticks at a constant rate. That would give a baseline to compare the other frequencies against. But you can't make a clock with 100 logic cells. The evolutionary solution didn't bother with a clock. Instead, it routed the input signal through a complicated series of loops. These presumably generated time-delayed and otherwise processed versions of the signals, which eventually were combined to produce the steady outputs. Presumably. Thompson described how it functioned like this: "Really, I don't have the faintest idea how it works." Amazingly, further study of the final solution showed that only 32 of its 100 logic cells were actually needed. The rest could be removed from the circuit without affecting its behavior. At first it looked as if five other logic cells could be removed - they were not connected electrically to the rest, nor to the input or output. However, if these were removed, the circuit ceased to work. Presumably these cells reacted to physical properties of the rest of the circuit other than electrical current - magnetic fields, say. Whatever the reason, Thompson's hunch that a real silicon circuit would have more tricks up its sleeve than a computer simulation turned out to be absolutely right. The point being that it's a long way until we understand our brain if it's such a problem understanding a "simple" circuit in the first place - plus I think it's a great story