Neuropsychology Central

[Guest]

Okay, I hope this isn't in the wrong forum.

A member of a physics forum with an unfortunate bent towards pseudoscience and I are having sort of a debate. He says that thoughts have mass, and I say that they are an abstraction resulting from the electrical reaction between axons and dendrites, and couldn't possibly have mass.

I was wondering if there are any neuroscientists who wouldn't mind helping me out with this one.

Thanks in advance,
Gillian

[Guest]

Hello guest,

actually, by considering thoughts to have no mass you are embracing the paradigm many people (including philosophers and neuroscientists) would find unscientific. In science, everything must obey the physical laws in order to exist. This means that everything in the physical world must habe mass and occupy space. So, if you think that thoughts have no mass, you don't consider them part of the physical world, but of a kind of "thought world", or "world of ideas" like Plato believed. Indeed, you are embracing what is known in philosophy of the mind as 'dualism'. This means that there exists a solid world of objects and things of mass and space, and parallel a world where there are 'things' without these properties, like thoughts and emotions. Rene Descartes was the most prominent representative of this view.

But what you said and the way you said it doen't sound like you wanting to stand on the unscientific side. Then, you would have to admit that thoughts don't exist in some spherical twilight zone, but are part of our physical world. Indeed, considering thoughts being made manifest in the physical brain, suggests that these thoughts must have physical properties themselves. Otherwise you would have to explain how a physical substance like the brain can produce something nonphysical and how you are going to prove it. In addition, according to neuroscience, thoughts aren't the electrical energy that can be measured at the scalp. Thoughts are produced by the concerted, i.e. simultaneous, working of distributed networks within the brain. These networks work with chemistry, rather than electricity. The chemical substances that nerve endings use in order to communitcate with each other have, indeed, a certain mass and occupy space, making them part of the physical world. This view is kown as materialism.

Bye,
Helix

[Helix]

sorry, forgot to log in.