/lit/ - Literature

>>15365088
>>15365188
Nice double-dubs.

>>15365547
I agree anon.
The strange thing is, why do we have so many persistant lies, which we all know to be lies, in the area of Higher Education? Why do they stick around?

>>15294589
Lincoln is so fucking based. Consider his "Meditation on the Divine Will" discovered after his death:

>The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

>>15117846
You can do the distinct property argument if you want to:

Liebniz Law states that for any X, X is identical to Y iff for every property P of X there exists a property P of Y.

If the mind is identical to the (material) brain, then every quality posessed by qualia would be posessed by the brain.

But the mind has a distinct property not shared by the brain: it has qualia (felt quality, the what-its-like bit).

So, by applying Leibniz' Law, we know the mind is not identical to the brain.

One way of trying to say what exactly makes the mind different is that, while the brain is material, consciousness is not: it is therefore "immaterial".

Of course this is debatable: you can reject the whole material-immaterial binary if you want to, because the concept of matter is itself somewhat blurry.

But to argue this more clearly you are going to have to work your way through a problemmatic associated with what "matter" is, which will bring you into some strange metaphysical territory.

Most neuroscientists are rather dim people, so don't expect most of them to tell you anything valuable about the nature of consciousness.