Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science.<\/p>\n
The first bit is a mention<\/a> of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained<\/i>, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must apply energy to the neurons to change their state. Where does the energy come from? We could put a person in a calorimeter and verify that the energy of heat that they put out is no greater than the energy of the food they consume. A corollary I immediately thought of is: why does thinking (or praying, for that matter) consume a measurable amount of glucose from the blood? Why should a “soulish” activity consume matter?<\/p>\n I have long maintained that whatever is meant by the Biblical terms (e.g. psyche<\/i>) translated “soul”, it cannot consist of matter or energy, but must consist of information<\/i>. Dennett’s thought experiment is further support for this view.<\/p>\n The second fascinating item is an Edge talk<\/a> by Stanislas Dehaene<\/a>. His research on cognition and consciousness has progressed to the point where it is possible to determine from a real-time brain scan if and at which moment a person becomes consciously aware of a stimulus<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I’ve recently been reading Sydney Lamb’s work in neurocognitive linguistics<\/a>; Dehaene’s work<\/a> seems to tie in nicely.<\/p>\n I shall be interested to read his papers on the cognition of number and compare with Dan Everett<\/a>‘s work with the Pirah\u00c3\u00a3<\/a>, whom he claims do not use numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science. The first bit is a mention of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must … Continue reading “There is No Soul”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics","category-rants","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1091"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1093,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions\/1093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}