If I knew the cellular & electrical activity of every cell in the brain, would the mind-body problem

The mind-body problem concerns the relationship of the mental with the not-mental. What you are suggesting is the possibility that fully knowing the physical substrate entails fully knowing the mental. It surely is related, but by itself does not solve the mind-body problem.

Consider how the knowledge of the causes of an effect does not necessarily entail the causes are the effect. The brain may be the cause of the mind, but that does not mean the brain is the mind. And here we have the mind-body problem.

If we cannot solve it even if we were to have ALL possible knowledge and information at our disposal, then does it logically follow that we can never solve it? So is the answer then that we will never solve the mind-body problem?

Reply to curiousnewbie "You would still never be able to know the exact moment when an electrical signal turned into a thought, or how that happened."

More importantly , you could not be sure that the feeling of what it is like to be experiencing something is being fully captured by the data being recorded. What does it mean to translate someone else's feeling of blueness into a set of numeric data and then share that feeliing of blueness? The essence of the mind-body problem is that relational context is cut off from objective 'third person' models of consciousness and what is left is generic abstraction.

Quoting curiousnewbie

be solved?

As of now an outside observer using fMRI can only see that certain areas of the brain light up, but it is impossible to tell what is going on at the cellular level. Let's suppose that you had access to all this data, could you then predict exactly what they are thinking?

My guess is that the answer is no, and that having this information is not sufficient to solve the mind-body problem. After all, you would still never be able to know the exact moment when an electrical signal turned into a thought, or how that happened. What implications does this then have, does it mean the mind-body problem can never be solved?

Seeing the micro level wouldn't be sufficient. You'd need to be able to comprehend what's going on a larger scale too.

Reply to curiousnewbie Observing the operations of individual neurons gets us one step closer to the goal of understanding nerves and brains. You've heard of C. elegans? It's a nematode with about 900 cells, in total. It has been subject to exhaustive study. '6/.tr,4]3dx~ome of its cells are neurons. These can be mapped, and observed individually. But nematodes don't do a lot of thinking, so... But it is a start.

If consciousness and self-awareness are emergent properties, then we won't find either of those properties in a few neurons.

Bee brains are a better bet. Bee brains are small but do complicated things, so they have to be very efficient. Individual neurons are probably singly responsible for some bee behaviors. We'll learn more by investigating bee brains than poking around in our brains and wondering, "What is it thinking right now?"

Reply to curiousnewbie How could you know it? To know it, the info would need to be stored in your brain. But then your brain would contain all the information about what is in the brain, plus the info about whatever else is in there - such as what your eyes are seeing right now. So your brain would have to hold more info than it holds, which sounds like a contradiction.

Reply to andrewk Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant that there is some God-like outside observer that knows and stores the information and also knows what it is your thouoghts.The question is purely hypothetical and is less about finding an answer and more about exploring limits of what we can know.

Try a slightly tedious but maybe pertinent computer analogy. The Great Electrician/Programmer has created the computer and knows every circuit. and also has created the program and knows every line - to calculate the digits of pi - and yet does not know the value of pi that will be output.

Each iteration of the same circuit and the same program produces a new output, and there is no calculating the output that is quicker or cheaper than running the program. IOW, living is the easiest way to understand the mind, and there is no abstraction that it can be reduced to without loss.

Reply to unenlightened Ultimately all these discussions about the mind-body problem are intellectual, and you are right, one shouldn't spend their entire existence thinking about their existence when they could just be living. Nevertheless, the gist of your post seems to be that we should simply not think about this problem because we can just live it instead, please correct me if I am wrong. With your computer analogy, I thought you were going to make the point that a great programmer still wouldn't know what would show up on his computer screen even if they knew what every circuit and electrical signal etc was but you didn't. Your analogy is akin to someone working on some equation that takes a decade to solve and that tells them what the weather will be like in the following week. I don't feel that that is what I am doing.
I know such questions have few practical purposes, to me they are posited in order to understand the nature of what we can and can't know.

Quoting curiousnewbie

I thought you were going to make the point that a great programmer still wouldn't know what would show up on his computer screen even if they knew what every circuit and electrical signal etc was but you didn't.

Well that was the point, and I'm glad you joined up the dots. But the implication is that even for God, comprehending is exactly equivalent to living. To comprehend the program is to have run the program, if not on the computer, then the equivalent in one's head; to comprehend a consciousness simply is to have lived it through.

Quoting curiousnewbie

As of now an outside observer using fMRI can only see that certain areas of the brain light up, but it is impossible to tell what is going on at the cellular level. Let's suppose that you had access to all this data, could you then predict exactly what they are thinking?

So, the mind body problem asks how can a non-physical mind (or soul) interact with the physical body, which doesn't seem to be your question.

Identity theory holds that for every mental state there is an identical physical state. A very strong identity theory seems unsupportable, where you would be saying that the brain processes were actually the experience. A weaker version would identify a particular brain state with a particular phenomenal state, so that you could predictably state that when a brain is in state A, the person is smelling roses (or whatever). The problem is that fMRI results have not shown identical brain states always correlate to specific phenomenal states. It's also problematic that we consider the report of the person to be the gold standard in identifying phenomenal states, not the objective verifiable data. That is, if the fMRI indicates I'm smelling roses, but I tell you I am not, we defer to me, not the fMRI.

I don't see why it's theoretically impossible for a weaker version of identify theory to hold, where there is some ability to decipher another's thoughts based upon various objective data, including brain activity. That would not address the mind/body problem though, as it could still be the case that a brain state was correlating to a non-physical mental event (whatever that means) as well. I do think, though, that if we got to the level where we could accurately predict phenomenal states and even control phenomenal states through brain manipulation, that would through Occam's razor strike a heavy blow against dualism because there would be no need to postulate the non-physical. If dualism is declared dead, then that would resolve the mind/body problem simply because there would be no non-physical minds to interact with.

The problem is that there's no way to know for sure which third person-observable data goes with which first person experienceable phenomena. This is because (a) we can't independently, repeatably check the correlations, and (b) the first person experienceable phenomena can't be displayed as such--it has to be turned into a third person observable form for others to know about it.

If we have enough data, we could possibly narrow down our guesses a fair amount--because maybe it will turn out that we have x number of cases where we third person-observed K, we have enough (third person reports) or first person J, and K and J turn out to not occur without each other very often, but it's doubtful that we'll ever progress beyond having to make guesses about the correlations.

This in no way implies that anything about mind isn't physical. It's simply a matter of the fact that mind is what it's like to be identical with a particular brain from the perspective of being that brain combined with the fact that nothing other than that brain itself can experience that first-person perspective.

Quoting curiousnewbie

If I knew the cellular & electrical activity of every cell in the brain, would the mind-body problem be solved?

No, You'd need to know the interconnection map of every cell in the brain too, and understand what that map meant as regards mental function. That's quite a task you've set for yourself! :wink:

The mind is not in the brain (this brain) like the cloud is not in this cloud or in the sky (this sky). There is no relationship between the mind and this body, only between the mind and the body, like there is no relationship between the cloud and this rain, only between the cloud and the rain. Knowing this we can say the problem is solved, no ? You watch the TV that say you have to buy this thing - this is the mind - and then you go and buy it - this is the body -.
You have read this and memorized it. When someone ask what is the relationship between the brain and the body, you can answer him. Someone look in your brain at that time. It will only find how you can say it. The semantics is not in the brain. It is only there in the comment.

Quoting curiousnewbie

be solved?

As of now an outside observer using fMRI can only see that certain areas of the brain light up, but it is impossible to tell what is going on at the cellular level. Let's suppose that you had access to all this data, could you then predict exactly what they are thinking?

My guess is that the answer is no, and that having this information is not sufficient to solve the mind-body problem. After all, you would still never be able to know the exact moment when an electrical signal turned into a thought, or how that happened. What implications does this then have, does it mean the mind-body problem can never be solved?

I fully expect that this problem will be solved someday. But there are people in Science and on these Forums, the Physicalists (or Materialists if you like), that say that your question has already been answered and is irrelevant. They say the Explanatory Gap is already Explained and there is no Hard Problem of Consciousness. Science will be slow answering your question if the Physicalists keep discouraging research into this. Your first effort has to be to make these people understand that there even is a Problem here.