"The mind is nothing but the brain, it's not a real thing on its own, just a useful abstraction we use to talk about the real material thing which is the brain"
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
If you are trying to change someone’s thoughts through brain surgery, this is the useful viewpoint to take. For most other purposes, treating the mind as an object in and of itself is the useful viewpoint. Regardless, the mind arises entirely from atoms.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
A mind that lives on the substrate of organic molecules can be the same mind as one that lives on a substrate of silicon or a mind that lives in a universe with different physics. The atoms are not an essential property of the mind.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
Just as how the chairness of a chair has nothing to do with the specific particular materials that chair is made of, only general requirements for the materials.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
And yet, the atoms of the chair come together to be a chair, merely by following their own laws. Multiple systems can give rise to the same mind; this does not imply that those systems are doing anything than following their usual laws.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
The chairness is not in the atoms, but in the form and function of the thing that they compose, and the reality of its form and function cannot be reduced to the atoms. Knowing only about the atoms doesn't let you point to chairs or talk a out how to use them.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
The chairness of the collection of atoms exists in the mind of the person looking at it. An alien with no limbs would have no concept of chairness and would never see one the way we do.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
A human can have a concept of a perch though they have no talons to grip it, or a thermal though they have no wings to ride it.
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Replying to @ValidOfPriors @ReferentOfSelf
Yes, and the alien would likely soon come to understand chairs after watching humans use them a few times.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
Right, so while the concept of "chairness" may exist in a mind, it is transferable to another mind in the form of sub-concepts at a lower level of abstraction...
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Yes. I am merely claiming that “chairness” does not exist in the chair.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
Agreed. Just reacting to what I thought was the implication that different types of minds couldn't understand each other's concepts.
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