I still don't know what your premise is... There's no need to be aggressive. It's a friendly discussion, at least from my end.
My premise is that there is more to the human psychie than biology. That's been my premise throughout. And I'm sorry if I sound snippy; but when you start asking me why I think that animals are happy to have their basic needs met... That sounds like you're being obtuse for the sake of being obtuse. I'm willing to concede that animals need more than food and water; but my point was that humans can have every possible need catered for and still not feel happy. We manage to be sad despite having every possible need attended to. By contrast; cats are happy to just chill out and eat and be stroked pretty much forever. Unless you think that they are laying around plagued by the ennui of the situation.
Intelligence is a result of chaos. You either don't understand what I mean by chaos theory (complex behavior arising from simple behaviors in large numbers) or you think intelligence and biology are disjoint. Chaos means that choices are not black and white and appear random, but are very much not. You know that your consciousness is a tiny tiny fraction of what your brain is actually doing correct? You also seem to be placing an arbitrary value on what "intelligent" is. Why do you think we are the a good example. We are just barely more advanced than our chimp cousins, and probably several rungs down on a grander evolutionary model. We're likely closer in complexity to insects than the more complex intelligence in the universe. The idea that our minds are somehow special has been prevalent since the ancient religions and we've always discovered that we become more and more unremarkable, the more we study how we work.
They very much do. Again, why do you think humans are special in this regard? You can test this, this isn't some philosophical argument, boredom causes hormonal changes which can absolutely go through the scientific method. Cats get bored in captivity, especially those who haven't had generations of evolving next to humans (tigers, lions...)
Have I not been clear that this is firmly my position? I do not accept that intelligence is just chaos. In any sense. I strongly believe that sentience is more than just biology. And yet we built space shuttles and they didn't. Why is that? Even as we have achieved more remarkable things. Satellites, electric cars, antibiotics, gun powder. All things that nothing else has managed to create. Why is that if we are unremarkable? Why are we sentient when nothing else is?
Did they tell you that? That's not the same as knowing what things are thinking. Seriously. It's not. You cannot look at my blood and tell me what I'm thinking. Even fMRI can't do that.
As someone who suffers from depression thanks to something called seasonal affective disorder. I can tell you it is literally brain chemistry. Due to lack of sunlight, my brain starts to ration vitamin D, which is used in the neurotransmitters for happiness. I then medicate that with a special lamp and vitamin supplements. My emotional state is directly tied to brain chemistry, therefore, my emotional well being is.
As someone who's bipolar I'll tell you that there is nothing medical in the world that can just make my brain do what I want it to do. Because it's more than brain chemistry. It's psychology, not neurology.
Who did? We Americans did. Did the Romans not think about love? Do you want a real scientific answer? Because building complex things requires building simple things first, then iterating on them. In order to iterate, you have to be able to transfer the knowledge from one member of the species to another. Few species have that simply because they don't need to. Even complex vocal creatures like dolphins or merecats do not have the language structure in their brain to pass enough detail between generations, so each generation learns new things, but also forgets things. Humans passed an intellectual threshold a million years or so ago where we were able to retain more information than was lost with each generation. This snowballed. The difference between knowledge bases where each generation knows 99.9% of what the last group did and a species that knows 100.1% of what it's previous generation did is astronomical over even a short period of time. Why do you think this is unique? Do you reject the consensus that it's extremely unlikely that humans are alone in the universe? Also, humans are not the only creatures to create things, we just have a greater mental capacity, so our complexity can be greatly increased. And what? Humans are not the only sentient species on this planet. Most higher mammals are.
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/bipolar-disorder/bipolar-medication-guide.htm Here are a list of medicines for treating bipolar disorder. Due to people being different, they have different brain chemistry. Just because they cannot treat your brain doesn't mean they don't work on others.
But surely if it's just brain chemistry then they can just test my brain and figure out exactly what I need pumped in, right? In so many words; if it's all determined by chemicals then why can't they fix my head?
The ability to pass on knowledge is a function of sentience. If it was just a roll of the evolutionary dice then how comes with all the thousands of species we were the only ones who got that? It's so weird to see you saying that humans are so unremarkable then arguing that we are a unique species (as far as we know) because we can pass down knowledge.
But psychology is applied neurology. Do you reject the idea that your thoughts are controlled by the neural connections in your brain? If you believe there is some paranormal thing like a spirit or soul wandering around in that wiring that's fine, but it's certainly not science. If not, then what do you think it is in a definable way? Okay, you have depression, well we know on a chemical level what causes that: you aren't getting enough dopamine to your neural transmitters (there are lots of different types of depression but lets use the most common for example.) Okay, it's related to biology because things like your stomach can tell the brain to produce more dopamine, but it's certainly more than that because you can think yourself into a depressed state too. Why is that? Do you agree that your mind is a self-reinforcing machine? If you rerun the same neural path over and over again, it becomes reinforced (that's how memories and opinions form.) These pathways connect to other pieces of the brain that have memories and other things, all of which have moods attached to them (by chemical markers in the neurons and paths that store them.) Those indicators can also cause brain to start creating or reducing dopamine levels. That's why you can think yourself into bad moods, and it's even easier if those pathways already exist. That's also why we talk things out, those pathways are dynamic and will change over time depending on how much you use them. Psychology is largely about creating positive feedback in the brain because drugs make you feel better without altering the pathways.
If you believe that there isn't some spark of sentience that we can't yet explain then you are arguing there is no free will. You understand that right? If we are merely biology then we cannot possibly have any freedom of thought. Your image of the brain is like an engima machine. Very complicated but if you feed in A you get B and there is no possible way you could get anything else. If you want to make the argument that we have no free will and are just complex automatons then by all means make that argument. But be prepared to explain why you think you made choices if your brain is only capable of processing inputs into outputs without any need for a directing intelligence.
Roman's could build catapults, but couldn't to the moon. There must be some non-physical explanation.
Not all problems that are based on just physical factors have an immediate, obvious, and easily implemented solution. Cancer isn't solved. That doesn't mean it's psychological.
What? You are selecting your definition on what knowledge is based on anthropocentric views. Beagles are notoriously difficult for humans to train. So how are hunting beagles trained? By other beagles. That's totally not a domestic thing too. Think hyena packs don't teach pups how to hunt? Flanking is not instinct, they've learned that tactic and passed it on. I said we're unique because we've passed the singularity where our knowledge base grows, not that passing on knowledge is the slightest bit unique. The thing about singularities is that once you pass them, it's an accelerating process. Also, sentience means self-awareness, I'm not sure what word you're looking for, but that's not it.
There's an argument that the industrial revolution should have happened in ancient Rome. They had coal and steel, they had lots of money, they clearly had inventors and engineers and understood enough to start tinkering. So why didn't they invent the train? The answer is because they had slaves. Whenever they encountered a problem they just hurled more slaves at it. The reason the Romans didn't go to the moon is non physical. Because their culture and society hadn't evolved to the point where they were capable of conceiving of that. Not because they were incapable of producing the science. Because they weren't capable of thinking the right way. That's my argument. What's yours? Seriously; if it's all biology were the Romans less evolved than us or what?
I will not apologize for using the human standard of knowledge in the discussion of human knowledge. So why has nothing else passed through the singularity? How can we both unremarkable and unique? No, sentience means the ability to perceive subjectively. Important word there.
Even as I write romance it depends heavily on my couple I think. One story I'm working on takes place over the course of almost an entire year (Hero A is a touch untrusting due to his recent past) whereas the other takes place in only the span of maybe a couple months time(granted it's more horror romance and the poor human fall deep under the malign deities seductive allure). Everyone is different. Sometimes even the people in one romance have different paces. I'm a much more intense and obsessive person than my reserved and laid back fiance so it's always been a waiting game for me to see when he finally catches up and at times that can be very painful and nerve-wracking.
The Roman's hadn't developed the technology to let them do that. Technology is not some sudden thing of "I need this, so I can create it". If you want to make a building, you're going to need either the technology to make bricks, or concrete, or some sort of stonework. That means you need a chisel, which means you need metalwork. Technology takes time to develop. It is not some instant thing. You need to understand what you want to do, and then develop the tech for it. One of the earliest black and white films is about going to the moon, meaning people had the concept and the desire, but it took us years to to be able to.
If every feeling is brain chemistry with a deterministic cause and a deterministic answer why have we been struggling to treat psychiatric problems for decades? Seriously. Why? What is standing in the way of our understanding?
