Just as other animals have evolved, so have humans.

We share many of the same physiological characteristics of other animals; as mammals we bear live young and are warm blooded, as vertebrate animals we have skeletons and muscles, and as self-propelled beings our brains have similar structures and functions to many other animals. As our bodies and brains have evolved, the workings of the brain can be assumed to be physical properties that occur due to evolutionary selection. There is no room for a mind or spirit that is separate to the physical workings of the brain. The psychological processes that operate appear as marvellous systems and maybe difficult to quantify, but they are still physical processes.

Comments

  1. Cameron Pritchard

    There seems to be a leap of faith here. How does one know the mind or the spirit are simply physical processes? Science has proven it? It hasn’t. Science limits itself to the study of matter; it actually doesn’t have anything to say about the Beyond.

    Have someone think of a tree. Now ask a materialist to disect The Brain looking for that image. You won’t find it! Trickier still, try to find the “I” (in The Brain?) that is looking at the tree. Again, you won’t find it!

    The response will be that we can see what is going on in the brain when a person looks at a mental picture. But chemicals are just that: chemicals. We can see them and people I suppose are justified in feeling a bit curious about them. But where is the tree?

    39:11 17:31, Apr 08 2007

  2. Francis

    I like to think of the idea of a tree in your head like a wave in an ocean, you can’t cut the ocean and keep the wave as a separate entity, the wave is a phenomena created by the individual water atoms moving together.

    39:13 14:24, Apr 10 2007

  3. Cameron Pritchard

    But don’t you think it’s interesting that you have to use a simile or a metaphor to talk about something supposedly physical?

    39:22 14:29, Apr 14 2007

  4. mummybot

    Yes I think it is interesting ;) but then all language is representation. My earlier post ‘communication and abstraction’ discusses language’s relationship to the physical. In a nutshell: just because we use language to describe physical reality does not mean that reality is only in our language.

    39:33 1:46, May 03 2007

  5. Rachel

    Read ‘Soul Cravings’ by Erwin McManus…

    39:85 21:38, Jun 12 2007

  6. mummybot

    Hey Rachel, sorry I have ingnored your post here for so long. That book looks interesting although having read the blurb and comments on Amazon I immediately find myself prejuding it. I agree that many people have quests, and certainly mine would be one similar to what McManus describes in the blurb. His book “interprets our need for intimacy, meaning, and destiny as common sense apologetics pointing to the existence of and our need for God”.

    There are many reasons why I cannot prescribe to this view: intimacy, meaning and destiny aren’t fundamental laws of human nature, just aspects of; they don’t justify a Christian God anymore than a Roman god or Santa Claus; and common sense used in this way can mean anything. For example I find common sense to believe I can fly. If I really believe and it is therefore logical to me, it will be my common sense. Except no matter what, I won’t be able to fly, just fool myself into the belief.

    39:160 8:47, Sep 07 2007

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