Sum of our parts

Hivemind187 wrote: »

Kind of missing the point really. The cognitive "I" is no more a manifestation of the devine or the supernatural (that which is beyond the natural) than an arm or a leg.

what...you are missing my point (again). Just because I said the supernatural statement etc. may be closer to the truth than what traditional neuroscientists believe, this does not anywhere imply that the supernatural statement is correct

Hivemind187 wrote: »

It is the cumulative expression of psychology and biology the genotype and the phenotype.

that is not really informative, where does the phenotype stop and where do you make the boundaries for the study of psychology? Even Dawkin's 'Extended phenotype' back in 1982 was making the simple argument that it is arbitrary to just consider the phenotype solely to be the effect of the genes on the organisms body, but that the effect of the genes on the environment (through the body) is just as important i.e. birds nests, beavers dams, termite houses etc etc..

And in psychology (or all the related disciplines that study the mind...cognitive science being a big one) trying to locate the mind within the brain is not the only game in town, for example to take a standard psychological position (much debated) is Gibson's position on sensations i.e. that they are not generated in the brain and then followed by some handy patchwork coupled with stored knowledge to produce a perceptual experience, instead he argues the neural networks just tune into different invariances in the environment, so basically what was thought to be the sole product of the brain (the construction of visual perception from the retinal signal and information stored in the brain), he instead argues that movement of an organism in the environment creates all sorts of dependencies with the sensory environment and that the proper study of perception is not what is going on in the brain but is instead the study of these organisms-environmental dependencies. Gibsons theories are far from uncontroversial but many leading perceptual scientists would still regard themselves as Gibsonians.

With cognition there is a whole wealth of research, computational models, theorizing regarding what is called situated cognition or embodied cognition all of which emphazise the role of the environment and body in cognition. Importantly, not in the trivial sense where the items in the world (such as a sketchpad) are simply tools to be manipulated by the illusive 'I' situated in the brain but instead should be considered just as much part of the 'I' as the unconscious neural subsystems which enable you to walk around without hitting walls (or even technological add-ons such as sensory augmentation). "The skin is not that important a boundary" is often the slogan of people working in this field. See Andy Clarks "being there" or "Natural born cyborgs" for evidence along this path, but there is also lots of papers on the topic.

Hivemind187 wrote: »

While it is nice to say that as human beings capable of creating art etc that we are more than simple bags of meat it is intellectually dishonest since no evidence to the contrary exists (or at least has been shown here).

That again is really unhelpful..bags of meat.. that is simply being dishonest, I have never seen meat talking, or walking, writing a poem or a scientific article.

Of course there is not an immaterial spark that is the root of the 'I' and thus a locus of reincarnation or something, saying that the 'I' is not located in the brain (or can be extended out in the body and the world) is not a claim that it must be supernatural, but is instead a simple empirical claim that what a neuroscientist may think has to happen in the brain does not in fact happen there but is instead the result of say the biomechanics of the body or the interaction with the world.

And the do you locate the 'I' in these parts of the brain that are involved in enabling certain aspects of it, what gives these neural subsystems priority over external or bodily contributions to the self (or indeed technological sensory or motor prosthesis).

The more than sum of its parts argument lead to empirical questions. Work in dynamical systems has showed unexpected emergent properties in many aspects of say motor control (look at Thelan and Smiths work) (because of the unexpected effects of the biomechanics involved and how it can simplify and distribute the computation). I suppose they are called emergent as they are not easily predictable from the sum of the parts..but when the science gets a grasp on these patterns they may not be called emergent anymore.

But if something is not predictable from the sum of its parts this just means more work needs to be done, not that it must be supernatural.