Yes...of course they have inherent traits. Those are traits built into the body, genes. But the mind is largely absent. That is why feral children do not develop normally. Mental development needs training and learning. Once the mind develops, the ego develops, self awareness develops and the personality develops.
I don't see it that way - the mind is there, it's simply innocent/primitive/primal... whichever of those you want to see it as. It's in a basic state, it will undergo 'refinement' over time, as it develops in response to stimuli, but that doesn't mean that it's not there. Feral children aren't feral because they don't have a mind, they are feral because the stimuli they experience are different to those we are used to, and so the development of their minds is different as well. Mental development itself doesn't need training and learning - or, rather, all experience is training and learning for the mind, so there's no need for a specific regimen - unless you have a particular goal planned for that mind. Ego, self-awareness and personality are all aspects of the mind, or particular perspectives on the mind, they cannot be removed from it, nor are they added later. They may not be prominent early on, but they are intrinsic aspects of the human mind.
But at the time of birth only Consciousness exists in a body. In other words, only life exists.
I fundamentally disagree, infants have personality traits as soon as they are born: there are fussy babies, content babies, active babies, curious babies...
There are three things. Consciousness, Mind and body. Consciousness is fundamental, life itself.
Not exactly how I see it. Mind includes aspects such as consciousness, body is a vehicle in which a mind explores the world.
Even insects are conscious.
Are they? Do we know this? Is instinctive response to stimuli without recursive awareness 'conscious'?
Mind is something that is built around the consciousness. It requires learning. Though the brain acts as a platform for the mind, the brain itself (neural connections) develops in line with learning. So, mind is a factor of learning and brain development. All forms of life have consciousness but do not have a similar mind because it is brain dependent.
We're using the terms in slightly different ways here, I think, but even within your framework I'd say this: mind is something that manifests along with consciousness, I'm not sure I'd pitch either as a 'source' or 'base' for the other. Mind itself I wouldn't say is a factor of learning (and the associated changes in neuroarchitecture) but rather that the growth of the mind/self/personality is a function of that learning.
Personality is the sum total of our consciousness, mind, ego and body. It is the totality of what we become as we learn and grow. It changes.
I'm not sure it's as clear cut as that, I don't see that there's a clear distinction between these concepts. It's a little like how quantum theory demonstrates that waves and particles are different manifestations of the same underlying 'quanta', so I think that consciousness, ego, mind and personality are all slightly different perspectives or emphases on the same underlying 'self'. Body I see as separate, as I've explained before.
No. mind is brain dependent and is different for different living beings. Consciousness is fundamental for all living beings. Even plants are conscious.
And that's where I'm pretty definitively not in agreement - plants are not conscious, there's no architecture there for a consciousness to manifest in.
I agree that we often use terms like conscious mind/unconscious mind loosely, but they are essentially different. That is why there is such a fuss about consciousness in philosophical circles. Mind can be understood to a large extent, but not consciousness.
I'm pretty sure no-one in either psychological or neuroscientific academia is confident that 'mind can be understood to a large extent'.
Check out David Chalmers. There is a thread here somewhere about Panpsychism.
Chalmers is a dualist, much as you - he's postulating something non-physical to fill a gap in the knowledge of how the physical works rather than accepting that we don't know. He has no evidence for this non-physical element, he just has questions that we can't answer yet. He's not definitively wrong, he's just not basing his concept on anything other than a reluctance to accept that we don't know yet.
OK...we are just using the words differently. But what exactly do you mean by ' I don't see that the biology is inherently necessary to the concept of consciousness'? Do you think consciousness can exist independent of biology?
Yes. As I said, although beyond our current technology, I don't see any reason a sufficiently advanced computer architecture could host a human consciousness.
Many of such experiences (NDE's) cannot be explained by just brain architecture.
Some of the specific detail of NDE's can't be completely explained by our current understanding of brain architecture, but the general phenomenon can.
It is because people try very hard to circumvent other explanations and try to force fit explanations into the standard mold that we think we have 'explained' things.
No, it's because we can accept 'we don't know yet' that we don't have a need to resort to unevidenced claims.
Regarding Planck,we cannot suddenly get selective and brush him off. He is a man of significant intellect and logical thinking. His philosophical views do indeed matter. If Richard Dawkins's philosophical views can be taken seriously, why not Max Planck?!!
They can, I was not dismissing Planck, I was putting him into a context, and pointing out that his arguments had to stand on their own merits, not on the fact they were derived from a brain hosting Max Planck.
Well...a hypothesis... "is a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts".
In the common parlance it's an equivalent to a 'notion', but there is the more technical origin of it where it's part of a scientific enquiry - it's formatted in such a way that it can be tested. If you can't test it, it's not an hypothesis.
I don't see why spiritual ideas cannot be hypotheses to explain life and death, as long as they don't conflict with other discovered phenomena.
There's no intrinsic reason, so long as the conjecture includes some means by which it can be tested - if there's no way to test it, it doesn't mean that it's wrong, of course, just that there's no reason to accept the notion.
It is the mind that gets projected into the virtual world. The basic consciousness remains outside.
The mind, even in your framework, exists in the consciousness. The vehicle of the body has been replaced with the vehicle of the simulation, the mind/consciousness is interacting with the virtual reality rather than the real reality, but the mind and the consciousness are not separated.
We in fact, use the mind to create a whole new personality within the virtual world. We could even lose sense of our real identity and get locked into the virtual identity.
In what way is it a new mind? It has the same experiences, the same morality, the same principles, the same emotional tendencies - it's applying those to a different external existence, but the internal elements at the point of transfer are the same. Those different experiences will result in a different 'growth' than would have otherwise happened, but that's no different to the change in 'growth' that would happen if you, say, emigrated and underwent new and different experiences.
It could be. There are various ways in which we can think of it as an illusion. Even at the physical level, we are essentially lot of empty space with some elementary particles. But it doesn't feel that way. Everything looks solid to us because of our senses and brain architecture. To a virus the world will look very different.
I see, I don't think that's 'illusion' - or, at least, I think that word has implications that go beyond what you're trying to say here. I'd say that our experience of reality is only one level of perception, but that doesn't make the real world an illusion. It's still there, it's still real, although our understanding of it is limited and constrained to some extent by our subjective nature and the sensory organs we've evolved with.
At the level of Consciousness it could be much more complex.
It could, but it comes down again to the question 'is there any reason to think that it is?'
Sensing is not just about organs, it is also about neural connectivity. This depends on experience, culture and training.
I disagree, but that's an information theory issue. The organs gather data, and that data is not subjective. Our minds turn that data into information, and that interpretation that makes it information is indeed subjective.
But all phenomena cannot be demonstrated with equal degree of physical precision. Everything is not physics. Biology is less precise, psychology is much less so. Spirituality is probably very much less precise. We should learn to live with that.
Phenomena cannot be EXPLAINED with an equal degree of precision, and therefore cannot be predicted with an equal degree of precision, but the phenomena themselves can be absolutely detected, that's the point. Consciousness is experienced, and various sciences are trying to explain the mechanisms, and to measure them to demonstrate or refute those explanations. Sprituality, it seems to me, wants to posit an explanation that can't be measured, can't be checked, can't be tested, and therefore can't be relied upon.
O.
