Are Human's ideas a program that is very complicated?

your objections to a mechanistic view of the human mind are springing from your belief that the body is God's work, and not from logic.

Recent studies have shown that synapses are forged, strengthened or suppressed by personal experience.

The biggest problem lies in what we perceive genes to be "for". It would be wrong to point to the gene "for", say, criminality.

All a single gene can do is express a tiny chemical. It does not contain a sophisticated behaviour pattern trapped in the structure of DNA.

True, the chemical will aid and abet the functioning of certain brain cells in certain circuits, which in turn are nested in ever more complex brain hierarchies, which eventually add up to a complete brain structure.

But these brain structures are not independent mini-brains. There are no "centres for" love of children or patriotism. Just as a single brain function such as memory is distributed among many different brain regions, so, too, can a single brain region be involved in many different functions.

It is unlikely that gene tinkering will allow for the clean targeting of faults and virtues.

It is far more likely that we will be setting in train processes and phenomena over which we do not have total control and where outcomes cannot always be predicted.

And even if we leave the genetic minefield, we might still end up in Brave New World. Running alongside all this discussion of genes "for" shyness or criminality is a lot of talk about chemicals that will allow all of us to give our work and our lives 110%.

To be that bit cleverer, that bit bolder. To be, in a word, superior. Drugs, however, are blunt instruments: when they modify brain chemistry, they modify it everywhere.

The effects are always indirect, and work at the level of single cells. The idea that there is a drug, and hence a specialist chemical, for something as complex as memory is, therefore, completely misleading.

WILL BRAIN IMPLANTS be able to refresh the places chemists and gene manipulators cannot reach?

Just pop in a few silicon memory chips and have instant access to superior knowledge?

Alas, there is no discrete little cerebral island responsible for French or the names and dates of the Plantagenets. And, in any case, the whole point about the human brain is not that it can store facts, it's what it can do with those facts, and how it can generate ideas.

There may be those who fantasise about achieving mental immortality by exchanging our messy biological brain tissue for silicon.

But to create a technobrain that was as good as a human brain, you'd have to make sure it had the same single-cell structure, the same number of synapses, the same three-dimensional circuitry, the identical macro-level chemical organisation, the same restless orchestrations of brain regions, and the same intimate electro-chemical dialogues with the rest of the body.

In other words, you'd have to know how your mind is different from my mind, and why and how the imagination works, and what creates creativity.

You would have to know what consciousness is, and what a "self" is, not just metaphysically, but in physical, brain terms. These are the ultimate goals of science. And until we can achieve them, we cannot claim that we have it in our sights to create a better mind.

And even if we do manage to create a race that is demonstrably superior to Homo sapiens in other ways - because it lives longer, smiles more often, and can go shopping without a calculator.

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Professor Greenfield is Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain

On the contrary, my belief that the body is God's work is springing from my objections to the mechanistic view of the human mind, and incidentally, the HEAPS of evidence that the human mind is not "simply" mechanistic.

It is now clear that your belief in a mechanistic view of the human mind is a "given" for you. That is, it does not derive from logic. Rather, it is an article of your faith. Your religion, Brandon.

You persist in making the statement that "life is irrelevant" because it conforms to your religion and not because the evidence supports it.

If "magic" includes natural processes currently beyond the understanding of modern science, then "magic" it is!

Brandon,

You consistently misread what I have written. Why? Is it because the strawman position that you would prefer me to have is easier for you to handle?

I have never said that the human mind is supernatural. I have said that the human mind in not "simply" mechanistic. That is, the scientific models available to us is an insufficient mechanism to explain the human mind. As I said previously:

jn wrote:

If "magic" includes natural processes currently beyond the understanding of modern science, then "magic" it is!

By the way, your "observation and analysis of the world" is seriously biased. Newton, Pascal, Faraday, and Maxwell, among a great many others more qualified than yours truly are giggling at you from heaven.

Brandon, the arguments in Penrose and others are so long that it would be rather impolite to abuse the readers of this board with them. Give relative a break on this one.

What is it about the brain which permits Penrose's proof, which would not also be true of any computer, the mechanism of which is unknown?

Brandon9000:

You require explicit arguments in support of my view, yet you don't supply any yourself. On a second read of this thread I discovered two points you are using:

1. Argument of duplication : It is possible to duplicate a machine. Human brain is a machine of some kind. Ergo, computers can be made like humans.

The flaw here is that every 'machine' is not a computer. A computer is very limited in what it can do (a Turing machine), it can run algorithms. Therefore, any non-algorithmic machine is NOT a computer.

2. Argument of non-existence of God.

Existence of God, or supernatural phenomena, is relevant only if we assume that the human thought itself is supernatural. In this sense the statement is paradoxical; we humans are a natural phenomenon by default, regardless if there is God or not. This comes out of definition of 'natural' - that is 'occuring in traditional nature'.


Therefore, your claims that human thought can be programmed on a computer are completely un-argumented on your part.

Relative

My argument does not depend on the idea that we are talking about a computer. Here is what I think. The human brain, together with whatever other parts of the human body may play into its functioning, are a machine. They work by physical law rather than magic. Therefore, it must be possible to build another machine that performs any or all of the same functions.

It is actually very simple. Find yourself a woman...then we need more arguments.

Brandon, it is not so far from the truth to claim that you have only made one argument, and its conclusion looks far too similar to its premise to be of great value.