# Minding the Brain  ## Metadata - Author: [[Angus Menuge, Brian Krouse, and Robert Marks]] - Full Title: Minding the Brain - Category: #books ## Highlights - thus has intentionality—it is directed toward an object. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=545)) - intentionality (those states are not intrinsically about anything and do not have a meaning for the computer). ([Location 572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=572)) - This would seem to imply that consciousness is an illusion, yet this is an incoherent idea, because only a conscious subject could be subject to an illusion, and illusions are intentional states. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=586)) ## New highlights added October 1, 2023 at 10:45 PM - a physical law is simply a regular train of thoughts that God thinks. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=819)) - People do not have to be taught to be dualists, as they must if they are to be physicalists. Indeed, little children are naturally dualists. Summing up research in developmental psychology, Henry Wellman states that “young children are dualists: knowledgeable of mental states and entities as ontologically different from physical objects and real [nonimaginary] events.” ([Location 1084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=1084)) - We now know that when one looks at an object, different regions of the brain process different electrical signals that are associated with different aspects of the object (e.g., its color, shape, size, texture, location).13 However, this claim will not work, because it cannot account for the fact that there is a single, unitary awareness of the entire visual field.14 There is no region in the brain that “puts the object back together into a unified whole.” Only a single, simple mental substance can account for the unity of one’s visual field or, indeed, the unity of consciousness in general. ([Location 1373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=1373)) - In II Corinthians 12:1–4, Paul asserts that he may actually have been disembodied. ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=1425)) - if physicalism or property dualism is true, we will have to abandon and revise our commonsense notions of moral ability, responsibility, and punishment because free will is ruled out. ([Location 1486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=1486)) - As Laudan notes, “polywater dabblers, Rosicrucians, the-world-is-about-to-enders, primal screamers, water diviners, magicians, and astrologers all turn out to be scientific… just so long as they are prepared to indicate some observation, however improbable, which (if it came to pass) would cause them to change their minds.”26 String theory, on the other hand, would have to be dismissed as a non-scientific since it posits extremely small-length scales unfalsifiable by any foreseeable experiment.27 ([Location 1999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=1999)) ## New highlights added October 2, 2023 at 10:45 AM - Like a mathematical wave, those changes to our brain state ripple outward, putting muscles in motion, which puts limbs in motion, which changes the state of the world—by changing the state of the mathematical framework that is the world—exactly according to his plan, which he faithfully realizes. ([Location 3898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=3898)) - Rather, informational realism asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of reality, of what it means, at the most fundamental level, for any entity to be real. ([Location 13221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=13221)) - say that Shannon’s theory is a syntactic theory is simply to say that it is concerned with the linear arrangement of symbols (bits, alphanumeric characters, strings of these, etc.). Shannon was, after all, a communications engineer, and in formulating information theory, he was attempting to solve an engineering problem. ([Location 13573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=13573)) - We tend to think of messages as inherently meaningful, but Shannon, in using the term, didn’t. ([Location 13585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=13585)) - Materialism’s great fault is that it artificially restricts the information sources that may be active in the world, ensuring that information sources unacceptable to materialism, even if they exist, will get ignored or misunderstood. In contrast, informational realism’s great virtue isn’t that it requires information sources unacceptable to materialism to exist but that it allows them to be discerned and properly understood if they do exist. Whereas materialism requires the world to fit its preconceptions, informational realism takes the world as it is, allowing the world to be itself. In so doing, informational realism defangs materialism and dissolves the mind-body problem. ([Location 13875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CGNXWTBN&location=13875))