DrNoGods wrote:
Your explanation is insufficient. We experience mental imagery in "image" form and not as non-extracted digital information.
This will be my last post on this topic.
Well that is that then. You've declared victory without any convincing arguments, but certainly no point in repeating the same things over and over again.
Actually our brains don't store "images" as digital information. Comparing our brains with precisely how digital computers work is an analogy that ultimately breaks down. Our brains are analog computers, not digital computers.
When our brain constructs a mental image it does precisely that. It "
constructs" the image. It doesn't recall a stored digital version of it. In fact, this is why human "
memory" cannot be trusted. Our brains "
remember" by trying to reconstruct past experiences. And our memory can actually be changed. This has been proven from experiments.
The fact that our brains "construct" mental images rather than recalling them has pretty much been well established actually.
Consider the following experiment that has been done.
A group of people were shown a series of photos and then asked questions about them later to see what they could remember when they conjure up a mental image in their mind.
One example is a photo of a man wearing a hat. The people where then asked later whether the man in the photo was wearing a hat. Some people got it wrong and said, no, the man isn't wearing a hat. Therefore the image their brain had constructed was of a man who was not wearing a hat. This is clearly not a digital recall of the original image.
This experiment was quite involved and contained many photos and many questions to test how well people could remember things accurately.
An important thing to note here is that people's memories actually change as well. These people were questioned multiple times, and often gave answers that differed from their previous memory.
In fact, they took this further and after having shown people picture, they exposed them to a make-pretend "gossip group". This gossip group would discuss the photos with the group of people who had seen them. However, the gossip group was part of the experiment, and so they were planting false ideas about what was in the photos. This effected the memory of the group that had seen the photos.
As an example, the gossip group might have insisted that there was a sports car in the background behind the man wearing the hat, when in fact there was no sport car in the original photo.
The test group was then asked later to recall the pictured they had seen, and people were now saying that they "remember" seeing the sports car behind the man wearing the hat. In other words, they added a sports car into their mental image.
This proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the brain is creating these mental images on the fly.
The brain no doubt also uses the experiences of having actually seen real images, but it's clearly constructing the mental images when it recalls them mentally.
And the reason that people who are born blind can't do this at all is because their brains never had any visual images to work with at any point. Therefore there brain did not construct these elaborate image-construction algorithms or analog networks.
So the brain only works with what it has to work with. If it never had any visual input it's not going evolve circuitry to construct mental images. People have had vision at one point in their life and have then gone blind can still create mental images in their mind because their brains had already constructed those analog circuit.
The bottom line for me is that AgnosticBoy's arguments simply aren't addressing the facts. AgnosticBoy seems to think that all images must have something to do with light, photons and eyeballs. But that's simply not how the brain forms mental images.
However, it is true that if a brain had never been exposed to light, photons and eyeballs, it would have never developed this circuitry to form mental images.
But this only supports materialism.
In fact, if we were hypothesize that some magical creator had created human brains, then there would be no reason to think that a blind person couldn't form mental images. After all, wouldn't a purposefully designed brain already have that capability whether a person's physical vision worked or not?
So the fact that blind people never form circuitry to form mental images actually confirms the materialistic hypothesis on this specific issue.
The very thing that AgnosticBoy seems to think refutes materialism actually supports it very well.
