<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:'bookman old style', 'new york', times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div>I'm sure you're right about how the argument would (and probably will) go. However, the opening notion that materialists must believe that thoughts have mass seems to come from a preposterous assumption that everything in the material universe has mass; this is inarguably not the case, yet acknowledging the existence of photons does not commit one to dualism.</div><div><br></div><div>And the argument is still pointless without an agreed-upon definition of "a thought". But I'm sure that won't stop anybody.</div><div style="font-family:bookman old style, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br><div style="font-family:bookman old style, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> spike
<spike66@att.net><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Thu, February 25, 2010 7:08:02 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [ExI] Is the brain a digital computer?<br></font><br>
<br><br>On Behalf Of Christopher Luebcke<br><br>...If you pass a high-powered magnet over the hard drive of my computer, the<br>mass of the hard drive will not change, but the information will be<br>destroyed... Christopher<br><br><br>In every imaginable practical sense, I agree. However, any absolute<br>statement with this bunch of scientific yahoos is a red cape before the<br>raging bull.<br><br>The argument would go like this: You specified that the magnet destroys<br>information, which represents the creation of entropy, which implies an<br>exothermic process, so energy is released from the system (granted it is an<br>unmeasurably tiny amount, but some). Energy is equivalent to mass: E =<br>mc^2 so mass = E/c^2, so passing the magnet over your drive causes it to<br>lose mass. Granted it might be only a few AMU, so you would need to pass<br>magnets over a mole of drives to cause their collective mass to go down by
a<br>few grams, but in any case, OLE!<br><br>{8^D<br><br>spike<br><br><br> <br><br>_______________________________________________<br>extropy-chat mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a></span><br></div></div><div style="position:fixed"></div>
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