Philosophical Question - Amiguing

[Mrs Beanbag]

Thought is a process, not an object. There's no reason I can think of that brain cells should be able to implement a process that silicon can't.

[Mrs Beanbag]

At a fundamental level it's chemical releases caused by pattern matching.
 
Ideas that feel right match patterns that trigger chemicals that hit the pleasure sensors.

Where do these "ideas" originate from, right-feeling or otherwise? And where do the patterns come from, for them to match?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Did anybody read my earlier post about the meaning of the word soul? The idea of an immortal soul we owe as much to philosophy as to religion.

I'm actually with Psxphill at this moment, the soul is an emergent process. The physical laws the atoms obey might be well understood, but understanding how something works at an atomic level, and understanding what it does at the macroscopic level, are two completely different things. The "determinism" of the soul is not physical/biological determinism though, it is abstracted from that. Just like you can have machine-independent programming languages, you can have biology-independent souls, but they still need a body to run on.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I found this paper a while ago, quite interesting:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/FileUploadPage/Filetoupload,90230,en.pdf

The concept of the state of the dead in children is actually not a million miles away from ancient Sumerian beliefs on the subject. Perhaps we have gradually rationalised these "natural" beliefs over the centuries. But belief in the afterlife wasn't as universal in the ancient world as is commonly thought.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Interesting/relevant article in the news today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8593748.stm