We’re very complex bags of meat if that makes you feel better.
LOL, phenomenal.
Glad you said it before I was forced to …
Although at the fundamental level we are truly biochemical automatons, the dialectic of self allows us to navigate a hyper-reality of “consciousness” through experience.
Negativity, in this instance, is not a pragmatic use of energy or mortality. You will still live and experience, and from one of the great masters, Albert Camus, absurdity is not an end, but a liberation from the servitude.
Embrace absurdity, and life is a wondrous thing.
If emotions were purely physical, that would seem to imply that we can’t modify our emotions through non-physical means. For instance possibly our only choice in terms of manipulating our emotions would be the use of drugs, as opposed to embracing different attitudes. If you are saying there is nothing at all in reality that is non-physical then maybe you are avoiding that problem. But saying “emotions are purely physical” seems to be implying that some things aren’t physical. Philosophically the issue strikes me as quite complex, but the ramifications of certain beliefs seem quite clear. I wonder if we are capable of understanding the ramifications properly. For example, a Buddhist might deny the mind-body split and a scientific materialist might deny the mind-body split, yet the respective behavioral ramifications would suggest that the original understandings of the issue might be quite different from each other.
Emotions are driven by peptides, (hormones), due to environmental variables. The brain is nothing more than a “drug factory”. Senses work off of the same principle.
“embracing different attitudes” is still a matter of environmental variables. Not withstanding the fact, the brain is busy making decisions without your attention or “knowledge”. It is what is best for the organism’s survivability.
Well that’s why I said “If you are saying there is nothing at all in reality that is non-physical then maybe you are avoiding that problem.” The fact remains that we can alter what we experience as physical (i.e. bodily pain) utilizing means that we experience as non-physical (i.e. willful shifts in attitude). It’s outside my realm of knowledge whether what we experience as non-physical is in fact physical. In my direct and limited experience emotions are affected by both physical and non-physical factors. I’m talking about it on a more basic level than you are.
Try reading, evolutionary cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science and etc. Even Pinker, covers this stuff extensively. The quest for consciousness and books on neuron and micro-circuits, also important.
In, evo cog neuroscience they show how false memory is retrived from a different part of the brain then true memories even when the person thinks that they’re telling the truth, it supports trivers ideas that organisms decieve themselves to better decieve others by eliminating the subtle signs of self-awareness of the lie.
They do this with males in relation to babies faces, showing evidence for a mental-mechanism meant to detect offspring by facial resembelence and the neural correlates of that, it talks about mirror neurons which fire when observing an animal making the same movement and appear to be linked to theory of mind *(understanding others are self-aware like you)
The book is a gold-mine of information for things like this.
I’m not sure what this means, but we know the brain has a impressive, impressive adaptive placticity (can re-wire itself in different ways to perserve function) we also know that some of these monk/mystics somehow manipulate this placticity to do things normally under unconscious control (raising body temperature to the point that it will dry freezing cold towels drapped over them which would kill a normal person, they force their blood voluntairly into different areas) or to ignore pain (like getting squished between nails).Theres nothing outside of physical when they accomplish these amazing feats, though I don’t know if everyone could have these abilities. I’m pretty sure testing has been done on people who ignore pain and there are neural changes.
Maybe so. I’ve never claimed otherwise.
I think what I’m saying is far more straightforward than you realize. If you have back pain, you don’t have to take drugs. You could decide to correct your posture. That mental choice will likely reduce your physical pain. It is outside my cognitive abilities to know whether free will can be explained in purely physical terms.
I’m not sure what books Tortoise read but there seems to be some confusion between psychiatry and psychology.
Psychiatrists come from a biological paradigm: human beings are purely physical, mostly chemistry and any problems they experience are deemed to have physical causes and can therefore be treated by physical means, that is, drugs.
Psychologists, it would probably be fair to say have no paradigm at all…the jury’s out as far as they’re concerned. however, their response to illness is more likely to be as, for example, in cognitive behavioural therapy, to achieve an improvement in emotional state by altering one’s thoughts.
Personally, my experience supports the practices of psychologists. Further, I would say that it is my experience that drugs do not do the job. They only appear to do the job in the same way as heroin appears to make people happy - at least on a temporary basis. Thus the best one can say about the physical approach of psychiatrists is that by giving people what one might call a sort of ‘time out’ while they are under the influence of drugs, they give the mind a space of time to get itself sorted out.
So, all in all, my experience backs the idea of mind preceeding the physical body. Doctors often use an expression ‘the skin is the mirror of the mind’, by which they mean that the skin condition and skin complaints normally indicate mental problems. I would go further and say that the body is the mirror of the mind.