Wed, 10 Dec 1997

At one time people looked at the things the mind did and the things machinery did and said "Nothing physical can do these things, therefore it must be something else, something non physical."

At this point that opinion was not quite crack pot although Heraclitus 500 B.C. had observed "A blow to a man's head will confuse his thinking, a blow to the foot has no such affect. This cannot be the result of an immaterial soul." So observant people knew 500 B.C. that we think with physical stuff inside our heads not with ectoplasm. Any informed person after 500 B.C. had the information to reject ectoplasm as a theory.

Now we see physical machinery that does the kind of stuff our brains do and to suppose ectoplasm is crack pot. The only advantage of ectoplasm is that we don't know its engineering characteristics and don't have to describe how it works. Today the ectoplasm is a fully crack pot theory. There is not one reasonable excuse for anyone believing in ectoplasm as an explanation for thought.

Consider the following modern form of the observation of Heraclitus at a boxing match. If someone is addicted to cigarettes you can predict their smoking behaviour quite accurately by monitoring the nicotine levels in their blood. You can sit at a screen and tell when the subject is going to take a puff on a cigarette. I'm sure to the subject it feels like free will because free will is always how decisions feel from the inside.

So if we think with ectoplasm it absorbs nicotine and uses nicotine in making its free will decisions about our behaviour. But if ectoplasm absorbs drugs, alcohol and impact we should be able to detect it with physical experiments. And even if we are making decisions with ectoplasm it is obvious from behaviour that the ectoplasm doesn't have free will either. If the ectoplasm had free will you couldn't sit at a screen and tell when the subject was going to take a drag on a cigarette. Its just something who's engineering characteristics are conveniently unknown, it obviously must have engineering characteristics.

People like Augustene knew there were decisions like when to have an erection that were clearly outside free will. He believed that those decisions were made by the devil and when we gave in to those things we gave in to the devil. If you aren't in control of yourself the devil must be in control of you. The results of this theory in human misery are a good example of why bad science is immoral.