What's good or bad? You can't compare anything too distant or you loose sight of the differentiation.
That stone is mater just like my brain but one was assembled molecularly a long time ago and the other evolved and was likely billions of molecules from around the planet at the time the stone formed.
I have info in my brain that's really only useful to me from a distance but truely only useful to my cortex, but my boss likes what I do with it for him. He says I do a good job but his competitors think it's all bad and some of my employees also attribute my success as a bad thing. But is that thing they consider bad me or something relative to them and not apples to apples to what my boss considers good?
Explain to me what exactly it means to show you a mind, and I'll tell you whether I can show you one. If you can't explain what you mean by "show you a mind", then I'm not sure how this question is different than "can you show me a gefadfij" - questions are only meaningful if we agree on what we're talking about.
Note: by default to your question of "can you show me a mind", I plan to show you a brain, plus lots of reasons to think this constitutes a mind (e.g., changing something in the brain changes how someone behaves, touching parts of the brain with electricity can reliably cause sensations to people, etc).
>If you can't explain what you mean by "show you a mind", then I'm not sure how this question is different than "can you show me a gefadfij"
This is basically my point, the mind is an undefinable concept.
Many people arbitrarily assume the mind is constrained to the brain, which is provably false.
For example, gut bacteria have a powerful influence on the mind.
Do you think it would be possible to completely separate the brain from the rest of the body and it's environment and still keep the persons conscious mind "alive" and in the same state?
Precisely my point. Saying "the mind is material" is like saying "the soul is ether"
Keep in mind we're only letting "intelligent" people contribute to this conversation and that in itself is biased. Why aren't we trying to identify why schizophrenic or people with split personalities chime in on why they perceive things differently and manage to survive.
We say they're unsuccessful in life but by our standards and that's not much different than a servant of a faith, no?
That's all your minds looking for. Things that change with a pattern it can differentiate. Bricks don't change unless something you understand changes it. Like inertas definition or Murphy's law, an obersavation of change from a perspective.
Note that this definition allows you to predict a lot of things:
1. You can predict that you'll have the same experience when eating other things which are not sugar, but which you know cause the same experience in you.
2. You can predict, at least in broad outlines, whether people will find this experience pleasurable or not (again, on average, broad outline, but still better than chance).
3. You can predict that someone without a sense of taste won't experience anything when eating sugar.
That's why this definition is meaningful. Of course I can play word games all day about "can you show me 'sweet'???". But those are word games that are trying to hide the idea of what a definition is and what we use it for.
But really that's just arguing over words and definitions. We know what we mean when we say material (certain properties and behaviors), and as far as I know, we have just as much reason to think that a brick is material as that a mind if material. We don't need to understand literally everything to be able to make predictions about how things behave.