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PHYSICALISING THE MIND


A Need for a New Nomenclature for some Neurological and Computer Terminology



Jud Evans


Copyright © 2010 Jud Evans. Permission granted to distribute in any medium, commercial
or  non-commercial,  provided  author  attribution and  copyright notices remain  intact.




Physicalising the Mind
The Need For A New Nomenclature To Replace The Current Non-Scientific
Reificative Terms Used In Neurological And Computer Terminology.
Some Sample Suggested Replacements Include


REIFICATION NEW COMBINATION THE NEOLOGISM
matter matter + energy matergy
sense sense + energy sensergy
data data + energy datergy



The terms matter, sense, data, experience/experiencing and action/activity  are useful abstractive fictions but simply do not exist. Experience is not a brain activity it IS the brain. Whilst we can do our best with some success to describe our experiences (such as tasting salt or sugar) we cannot identify what experience IS because from a physicalist POV - what does not exist cannot be described. There is no duality involved. What exists is a meaty stimulated and responsive calculator, which reacts to the internal and external stimuli in a manner of which the precise method is not yet totally understood. The crude notions of there being a mind in there somewhere is acting as an obstacle and financial burden to serious research, and millions of dollars are being squandered in a fruitless search for something which represents the ancient beliefs of primitive man

All organisms respond to stimuli. Excited by the light/warmth a leaf turns towards the sun. When a plant turns towards a light source it is known as phototropism. But that does not automatically instantiate phototropism as an existing dualistic accompaniment of the phototropic vegetable material. Touch certain plants and they automatically withdraw or curl up. That does not mean that some primitive spook called a curler or curling or a withdrawer or withdrawing can be found in the plant. (compare Heidegger looked at a leaf and searching for the is of its greenness. In the most notorious confession in philosophy finally admitted that he did not understand the meaning of the Be-word is.
[1] (Heidegger.Grundbegriffe.Basic Concepts)


For the same reason when neurosurgeons peer inside the exposed brain looking for a soul or a mind or consciousness or other primitive stupidities like qualia, etc. they will never find anything.

Such sun-seeking traits have evolved in plants over thousands of years. Growing towards a light source that beneficially changes the photosynthesising matergic entity, improves the survival rate of the plant. The human brain has developed in a similar way. Whilst the greatly improved sensorial and calculative abilities have changed the character of the meaty material and the specialised brain cells - the actual software or to quote the current in term - the wetware does not exist as such.

Software and wetware exists as a series of electrons arranged in a certain way, just as the metal hard disc is electronically arranged in a different way (as a connected series of metal discs.) To a computer programmer or a specialist there is nothing complicated about the fact that a computer can provide a condition report whenever the operator requires one.

I have such an datergicware object of systematised matter on my PC which alerts me if the computational material, ( i. e. the computer) is overheating. That does not mean that either the information exists nor the condition exists - it just means that the computer exists in that physical manner at the moment it was instructed by me to give the systems report (an arrangement of datergy on my screen) and that I modify the way I exist by becoming informed as to the temperature of the computer.

Thus when a human body provides a systems alert (referred to by the Platonist philosopher as qualia (Latin for what sort or what kind,) or report in the form of electro-chemical signals from the eardrum or he damaged toe - it is the tintinnabulating eardrum and the stubbed toe that exists not some primitive dualism called
tintinnabulation or pain.

The human brain does not provide its feed back in the form of a readable script on a monitor screen, because developmentally and ergonomically a meaty monitor screen attached to the human head would have provided a clumsy encumbrance - specially when walking about in low-ceilinged caves. The painful toe alerts the CNS electronically via nerve fibres, and the read out is managed by the regrouping and re-chunking of the synaptic openings and closures within the network (the rapid colour changes of a squid provides a useful analogy) which provides patterned cellular configurations that symbolise the ringing ears or the damaged toe.

Nature is very simple. But for people who believe in spirits, ghosts, disembodied mindsconsciousness and the rest of the compendium of foolishness, it is in their interest to make the processing human brain appear as mysterious as they possible can. A general realization amongst the public that these dualisms are merely the result of ignorance would throw immediate suspicion on the claims of religion and its souls and spirits and the rest of the mumbo jumbo.

The ontologically confusing and misleading terms Hardware and Software are defunct, useless, out of date terms which give completely erroneous impressions of what constitutes a computer or a human brain.

When a computer programmer introduces a datergic programme or the human brain receives some internal or external sensergy that interacts with the physical existing matergic CD-disc or the brain meat - the datergy/sensergy is converted into datergic electrical pulses (the bit stream) by reflections of the matergic laser beam from a photoelectric cell via the systematised (suitably arranged) matergic material we call the datergic operating system. What he installs is merely another form of electronic datergicware (currently called software.)

In other words the whole computational operation is a physical one using combinations of purely material components - there is nothing metaphysical involved at all.

The so-called software is usually provided in the form of a physical CD, or datergy-stick or (or now less usually) a floppy disc, and is composed of micro matergic objects we call electrons, (force fields if you prefer) which cause the matergicware and the datergicware to interact and cause the physical computer to exist differently.

But that does not mean that either the action of the original hardware or the causal action of the datergicware exists - it simply means that the metal pieces of the hardware and the electronic pieces of the application datergicware includes programs that do real work for users. For example, word processors, spreadsheets, and database management systems fall under the category of application datergicware.

But it is the physical personal processor and the physical processing brain and the physical datergy which is processed and can be found in the world - not the processing.