Let's forget about being politically correct

Unsound, I forgot to respond to you. Everyone is dualist, because we all think. But then if you believe that you are only your thinking, then you are dualistically attached. In this sense, you only believe that comparative rationality - the cognitive tool science uses to implement empiric method BTW - is a way to the truth. You think: I think, therefore I am; rather than, I sometimes think an sometimes I don't, because I am. A person who believes this, in operation, inverts being and cognition. And if someone is really attached to the power of their thinking mind, then they even go so far as to say that thinking about matter is the only way to truth, and that the mind doesn't exist except as matter, ie a computer of matter, and that it is meaningless to discuss mind, thereby, in doing that, effectively preventing themselves from ever examining their own attachment to dualistic thinking, and attachment to the power of that thinking, and the attachment to that will towards power...

Sound like anyone we've heard from lately.

Actually, I don't know Unsound how dualistically attached you are on a continuum of attachment. You are smart and I like mixing it up with you, as a foil, so to speak. Sometimes I'm speaking directly at you, but many times I am not (hence, pulling TOK out of his closet with the bear trap, which, by your answer, you saw, even though you didn't enjoy it perhaps...). I try to make this instances clear, but I will try to be clearer in the future. Actually, I enjoy your mind very much, dualism or not. That's the thing you should know.

Asa, your perception was right on. I was fatigued and tired during my last post. As to how smart I am, thank you, but, I do realize that I am uneducated and ignorant. Science by the very need of its continuing existance is ignorant. That does not trap science into seperating/ignoring the mind from matter. That the mind is (at least in part) the product of enviornmental stimulous that produces an electro/chemical energy response within the matter that is the brain, "A state of matter". As such even an erroeneous concept is a state of matter, and a thing. I suspect what/how the mind is/works will probably be better understood in the next 50 years or so. For better or worse after that, the enviornmental stimulous up to and including cultural bias upon a genetic predispostion will be better understood and on some level may even be predicted. Art may be subject to a new paradigm.

"...That the mind is (at least in part) the product of enviornmental stimulous that produces an electro/chemical energy response within the matter that is the brain, "A state of matter"."

Unsound, are you walking backward, bro? :-0)

You drive the car; the car is a product of brain/mind/your/our/we/science/technologies... Sound familiar Shubert?

Unsound, this is the basic disagreement between us - which doesn't, in fact, effect how I respect you, because I don't experience you as just a quantitative sum of your thoughts.

The difference is one, as I said, of materialism. You believe that the mind can be completely explained by scientific means of examining the matter of the brain and the interactions between the various matter centers of the brain. I agree that brain physiology, MacLean's Triune Theory, Right/Left hemispheric studies, and even how networking happens in the brain in terms of matter change, etc. are all important and can tell us many things. The difference is that I do not think that consciousness is limited to the intra-actions of matter and is, in fact, primary to matter. I can not prove to you how I know this, because reality has it rigged that you have to perform that interior examination upon yourself, but I can show you the incongruencies in the exclusive position of science - which should, even from a scientific position, lead you to investigate what may be beyond science/matter.

The default to not doing this is, of course, the position that science doesn't know everything yet but it will eventually - which is a position that is hardly rigorous in a systematic scientific way, but more indicative of...faith. And in this sense, while noting the partiality of the scientific orientation to reality, I have tried to show that science itself is merely the next exclusionary ideology to be transcended as a mode of apprehension. Since every previous ideological perception through evolution has been transcended, I would say that the product of that evolutionary experiment is fairly clear by now. That science ascends itself as the end point of knowledge - even to the point of asserting that it will find what mind "is" even though it doesn't know now, or can't show why they will other than the assumption that adding more blocks together will show the way - is inconsistent with what all evolution has already shown us. Science asserts exclusivity of knowledge and denies its partiality. That is irrationality by definition, even by science's definition...

Consider this: Last week it was announced by the astro-physicists that they have finally identified the "missing mass" in the universe, even though they don't know what it is, as in its nature. They have been arguing for about twenty years whether the universe will keep expanding forever (not enough mass to produce enough gravity to then pull it back upon itself down the road) or eventually collapse into, assumably, a singularity once more (the so-caled Big Crunch, opposed to the Big Bang). So, they have these wild measurements that seem to indicate that there is much more mass in the universe than they can see or even add up (even with all the conjectured neutrinos added in), so they've been looking for "dark matter" which is dark because they can't see it. So, they now say that they've found not only the dark matter but also another type of trans-matter force that, while not matter it seems, seems to be the propulsion to the outwrds expansion, and which for nor seems to bolster Einstein's speculation of a cosmological constant (an assumption he came up with to make his theories work correctly, but one he could never quite accept, calling it his "worst blunder"). They are calling this force "vacuum energy". They have no idea what it is but know that it was first to come out of the Big Bang and assumably caused the significant inflation of the universe at about 10 (-39) seconds after emergence of the "force".

Hmmm, energy that is not energy that underlies all matter, and that constitutes the emergence of dimension...

Is dimension-force a thing, or does it simply have to be so, so one can then keep believing in the assumption that all will become clear from an examination of matter?

Hmmm...

Dammit you guys, I think my head's going to explode. And I was looking forward to a relaxing long weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday are holidays for many up here in the Great White North), but now this stuff is going to be running around my mind as I try to understand... ;-)

Exceedingly intersting discussion BTW.