What's there to understand? We know how intelligence "happened". We just need to build a few million human-sized brains, attach the universe, and simulate a few billion years of evolution. Whatever comes out of that could just be called "AGI" by definition.
I mean, say, photosynthesis also happened by evolution. There is still a lot to understand about photosynthesis, and we do understand now, although it took decades of research.
Sure, but we understand enough so that we can recreate photosynthesis in a lab. There are many drugs which do work, but we don't know exactly how they work.
The point is, it's likely not a necessary precondition to understand AGI in order to create it.
We don't know that's how intelligence happened. That's just speculation based on materialist assumptions. Intelligence is most likely immaterial, i.e. abstract concepts, free will, mathematics, consciousness, etc. In which case, it's beyond anything in this physical universe.
Your way of thinking leads to dualism, which has been proven to be a bad approach to the problem of consciousness. Dualism doesn't explain anything, just moves the problem outside of the 'material' realm into fantasy lala-land.
Hey, if materialism cannot explain reality, then why stick with a bad hypothesis? Sticking your fingers in your ears and calling any alternative 'lala-land' sounds pretty anti-intellectual.
I am not a materialist, I am a physicalist. And la-la land is just a fit metaphor for thinking that conscious experience is explained by a theory that can't be proven or disproven. If you think your consciousness is received by the brain-antenna from the macrocosmic sphere of absolute consciousness (or God, or whatever you call it) then remember about your mother and father, and the world that supported your and fed you experiences. They are responsible for your consciousness. Your experience comes from your parents and the world, and you are missing the obvious while embracing a nice fantasy. And if you don't make babies you won't extend your consciousness past your death. Your parents did, and here you are, all conscious and spiritual.
> Intelligence is most likely immaterial, i.e. abstract concepts, free will, mathematics, consciousness, etc. In which case, it's beyond anything in this physical universe.
For the purposes of my argument, intelligence is a set of behaviors that would be described as "intelligent" by our contemporaries. I have no use for an inscrutable philosophical definition of intelligence, consciousness, free will, or any of that stuff.
I'm convinced that these behaviors arose as a result of natural physical processes and that if we were to reproduce them, we would "most likely" receive similar results. We can already observe this process by simulating simpler life forms[1].
Of course that's speculation, but it has better foundations than "it's beyond anything in this physical universe". That's the scientific equivalent of "giving up".
Why is that the same as 'giving up'? I call it a better hypothesis. It's like saying there is a halting problem and there are problems that are fundamentally unsolvable by computers. If true, it's pointless trying to create an algorithm to solve the halting problem. Instead, perhaps the mind is a halting oracle, and we can progress even further in the sciences by that realization.
> Why is that the same as 'giving up'? I call it a better hypothesis.
It's not a hypothesis, because it doesn't explain anything. It's also not falsifiable, so it is not useful for the purposes of science.
> It's like saying there is a halting problem and there are problems that are fundamentally unsolvable by computers
The halting problem is a rigorously defined mathematical problem which has a mathematical proof that demonstrates that it is indeed unsolvable. That's entirely different from saying that "there might be such a thing as a halting problem and it's probably unsolvable".
Furthermore, the halting problem is abstract from physical reality. It is true regardless of anything observed in physical reality. In physical reality, there is no such thing as a program that will not terminate, because there is no such thing as a computer that runs forever. The "physical halting problem" is solvable. The answer is always: The program will halt at some point because of thermodynamics.
Similarly, it is my position that the physical phenomenon of intelligence can be entirely explained by natural processes involving no metaphysics whatsoever.
> Instead, perhaps the mind is a halting oracle, and we can progress even further in the sciences by that realization.
Perhaps it is, but there is no such realization. You haven't even defined what you mean by intelligence and why that would even require a non-materialist explanation.
> Well then, how is materialism falsifiable? If it isn't, how is it a scientific hypothesis?
It isn't a scientific hypothesis.
You use the word "materialism" to segregate yourself philosophically, but I haven't made a philosophical argument.
Let's suppose your "hypothesis" is true, but given that it is beyond physical observation, we can never hope to know that it is true or even know the probability of it being true. Then what would be the benefit in assuming that it is true?
We could conceivably save some time on trying to figure out AGI and instead do something "more productive". However, that's true of almost any endeavor. Anything you do in life has a chance of failure and an opportunity cost. Just imagine what could have become of us, had we not bothered to write HN comments!
I don't know what "materialism is scientific" would mean exactly. I never made that claim, so don't ask me to defend it.
Remember, you are the one who wants to fight this "materialism vs. dualism" battle, not me. I'm not saying your position is wrong. I'm saying your position seems inconsequential at best, but harmful at worst.
To illustrate this, let's take a hypothetical "dualist" explanation for disease:
"Disease is caused by spirits that attach to our bodies, but we cannot observe these spirits by any physical means and we can never interact with them in any distinguishable way."
In other words, we cannot perform experiments, we cannot learn anything, so these spirits might as well not exist at all. There is no practical difference.
Now that's all fine and well until you realize that disease is actually caused by physical processes than you can understand and intervene with. Had you been convinced that it was spirits all along, you wouldn't have bothered trying to figure out the physical processes.
Today this example may sound ridiculous, but for most of history similar convictions held people back from turning quackery into real medicine.
And on the materialist side we have similar quackery with phrenology, bogus medicines, Darwinian evolution, and the like. There is quackery everywhere. The fact that one can concoct a false explanation within either materialism or dualism means such an example doesn't help determine which paradigm is better.
The important question is whether one paradigm allows us to explain reality better than the other, and dualism does this very well. There is no materialistic explanation for consciousness, free will, abstract thought or mathematics. Instead, those who follow materialism strictly end up denying such things, and we end up with incoherent and inaccurate theories about the world.
> And on the materialist side we have similar quackery with phrenology, bogus medicines...
Yes, but the key distinction here is that phrenology or bogus medicine are testable. If you claim phrenology predicts something but then statistics show that this isn't the case, phrenology is proven wrong. It's more difficult with medicine, but it's at least possible.
Furthermore, we know that many of our "materialist" theories in physics are wrong. We know it because they disagree with experiment. However, they still have enough predictive power to be very useful.
> ...Darwinian evolution, and the like.
I'm not sure what you mean here. The principles behind Darwinian evolution are easily reproduced. Re-creating billions of years of evolution in a lab would be difficult, of course.
> The important question is whether one paradigm allows us to explain reality better than the other, and dualism does this very well.
I don't think it does it well at all. An explanation that you can not test isn't useful. In fact, a wrong explanation that you can test is more useful.
There's an infinite number of "dualist" explanations, all of which we cannot test. So which one to choose? Why stop at dualism, why not make it trialism? Why not infinitism?
Why not just say that there's an infinite number of intangible interactions, that every mind in the universe is connected with every other mind through a mesh spanning an infinite-dimensional hyperplane? You can't prove that this isn't the case, why not believe that one instead?
> There is no materialistic explanation for consciousness, free will, abstract thought or mathematics.
Well, so what? All of the "dualist" explanations are equally useless, so I might as well do without any explanation whatsoever.
> Instead, those who follow materialism strictly end up denying such things, and we end up with incoherent and inaccurate theories about the world.
Inaccurate and incoherent theories that are testable can nevertheless be very useful. Coherent theories that are untestable are useless, unless maybe you can turn them into a religious cult.
Also, Darwinian evolution is well known to be false. Just read any modern bioinformatics book. There are a whole host of other mechanisms besides Malthusian pressure, random mutation and natural selection that are used to explain evolution nowadays. As Eugene Koonin says, the modern synthesis is really a sort of postmodern evolution, where there is no ultimate explanation for how it works. Koonin even promotes a form of neo-Lamarkianism. Darwin's unique contributions to the theory of evolution have been experimentally discredited. You can easily disprove Darwin yourself with all the genomic data that is online these days.
I assume that your conception of dualism is not testable because, in your own words, it is "beyond anything in this physical universe".
If it's beyond the physical universe, it cannot be observed and therefore it can not be tested. Otherwise, it would be part of physics and the physical universe just like gravity, if only hitherto unknown.
> Also, Darwinian evolution is well known to be false.
So is the general theory of relativity. Yet, it's "right enough" to allow us to make sufficiently accurate predictions about the physical world.
Furthermore, one theory being wrong doesn't make other theories "more right".
> There are a whole host of other mechanisms besides Malthusian pressure, random mutation and natural selection that are used to explain evolution nowadays.
As you say yourself, that's besides random mutation and natural selection, not instead. It would be a miracle if somehow Darwin could have gotten all of the details right with the tools available to him.
Also, in science everything is an approximation to some degree, there are always factors you disregard so that you can actually perform a prediction in a finite amount of time. There's variance and uncertainty in every measurement.
> As Eugene Koonin says, the modern synthesis is really a sort of postmodern evolution, where there is no ultimate explanation for how it works.
There's no "ultimate explanation" for anything. It's turtles all the way down.
It doesn't follow that for something to be observed it must be part of physics. If the physical universe is a medium, like our computers, they can transmit information from other entities without the entities themselves being embedded in the computers. It sounds like your argument begs the question by first assuming everything that interacts with us must be physical.
Darwin's mechanisms do not explain anything in evolution. All of his mechanisms select against increased complexity and diversity, so are useless to explain the origin of species as he originally claimed. Darwinian evolution is dead and died a long time ago. Modern evolution is very much non-Darwinian.
> It doesn't follow that for something to be observed it must be part of physics.
It's the other way around. If it can be observed, it interacts with matter. If it interacts with matter, it is within the domain of physics, by definition. I don't understand why you have a problem with this.
Physicists are well aware that we do not understand all the interactions and we do keep discovering more and more interesting phenomena, such as quantum entanglement.
> All of his mechanisms select against increased complexity and diversity, so are useless to explain the origin of species as he originally claimed.
I don't know where this criticism comes from, but it sounds like a straw man. Natural selection may select against "complexity and diversity", but random mutation puts "complexity and diversity" back in the game.
I think you are equivocating between the laws that govern material interaction and things that interact with matter. They are not the same thing. The laws of physics are developed by breaking matter down to its most uniform and granular components, and then characterizing their interaction. An immaterial soul would not be captured by such an analysis, but its interaction with matter could still be empirically identified.
As for evolution, I see where you are coming from. Randomness, like flipping a coin, is always complex and different. However, if there are only a few specific, long coin sequence you are trying to construct, then flipping a coin does not get you there. There are just too many possibilities within a couple hundred coin flips to check within the lifespan of the universe. And, if you have one of these sequences, then randomly flipping some of the coins will destroy the sequence. Just think about what happens if you flip random bits in a computer program. For the most part, unless you get really, really lucky, it will destroy the computer program. So, while a few random mutations may be very lucky and flip the right nucleotides to create new functionality, the vast majority of mutations are destructive, and will kill off the species before there is the chance to evolve new functionality.
> I think you are equivocating between the laws that govern material interaction and things that interact with matter. They are not the same thing. The laws of physics are developed by breaking matter down to its most uniform and granular components, and then characterizing their interaction. An immaterial soul would not be captured by such an analysis, but its interaction with matter could still be empirically identified.
If an "immaterial soul" interacted with matter in an empirically identifiable way, it is part of physics. The forces that interact with matter are themselves not made out of matter. To be precise, matter is only that which has a mass, but there are also particles that don't have mass. Their interactions are nevertheless part of physics and we can measure them at least indirectly. They're not abstract constructs, they're very much part of the physical universe.
In that sense, perhaps the term "materialism" is misleading, because ultimately physics is about forces, not matter. Remember, I'm not using that term for myself.
> However, if there are only a few specific, long coin sequence you are trying to construct, then flipping a coin does not get you there. There are just too many possibilities within a couple hundred coin flips to check within the lifespan of the universe.
There isn't just a single coin though. There's about 10^46 molecules in the ocean[1]. That's a lot of interactions over the span of billions of years.
> And, if you have one of these sequences, then randomly flipping some of the coins will destroy the sequence. Just think about what happens if you flip random bits in a computer program. For the most part, unless you get really, really lucky, it will destroy the computer program.
It depends on the bits flipped. Bits flip all the time[2] and people rarely notice, because they're not necessarily important bits. It also depends on whether the program will abort upon error detection. Without memory protection by the operating system, most programs wouldn't terminate, they'd keep trucking along, perhaps producing some garbage here and there. In fact, the difficult part about memory corruption bugs is that the program often won't terminate until well after the corruption has taken place.
Also, computer programs aren't like organisms exposed to nature. In nature, it's possible that a mutation kills you, but it's far more likely that some physical process or another organism kills you.
> So, while a few random mutations may be very lucky and flip the right nucleotides to create new functionality, the vast majority of mutations are destructive, and will kill off the species before there is the chance to evolve new functionality.
The vast majority of mutations are relatively inconsequential, at least for short-term survival. Our DNA mutates all the time, but also we have evolved error correction, which you probably also will not accept as evolving "by random mutation and selection".
So, it doesn't really seem we are disagreeing, it's just a matter of terminology. You seem to want to call every interacting thing 'physics', which you are free to do, but then I'm not sure what the value of the term is. And, you agree we already empirically measure many immaterial things. So you seem to agree that in theory an immaterial soul is an empirically testable hypothesis, in which case I'm not sure what your objection is.
As for the number of interactions, we have trouble reasoning about large numbers. Billions of years and molecules sound like unimaginably large numbers and of similar magnitude to trillions or decillion, even though the latter are many orders of magnitude greater. DNA sequences can be hundreds of billions of base pairs long. So, if we could only depend on random mutation and natural selection, we'd need 4^10^11 attempts to hit a particular sequence, which is more trials than even a multiverse of universes can offer.
> So, it doesn't really seem we are disagreeing, it's just a matter of terminology. You seem to want to call every interacting thing 'physics', which you are free to do, but then I'm not sure what the value of the term is.
Everything that interacts with matter is in the domain of physics. So if your concept of a "soul" (or whatever makes you a "dualist") can at least in principle be observed, we can count it in. It's then not "beyond this universe".
It would also raise a lot of questions: Are souls "individuals"? If so, does every organism afford a soul? If so, where do new souls come from when the amount of organisms increases? Where do they go if they decrease? Is there really only one soul spanning all organisms? How can we test for any of these things? What are the consequences?
It's perfectly fine to explore such questions, but I am personally not convinced that something like a soul - within or outside the realms of physics - is at all necessary to explain life or intelligence as the phenomena we can already observe. That's what we disagree on.
> DNA sequences can be hundreds of billions of base pairs long.
Perhaps, but the simplest lifeforms alive today have on the order of hundreds of thousands of base pairs.
> So, if we could only depend on random mutation and natural selection, we'd need 4^10^11 attempts to hit a particular sequence, which is more trials than even a multiverse of universes can offer.
Yes, but DNA didn't just form spontaneously, fully assembled. It formed from simpler precursors, which formed from simpler precursors still, all the way down to proteins which formed from the simplest of molecules. Those precursors don't survive because they can not compete with their successors. They could be forming in the oceans right now, but they won't progress because they'll just get eaten.
There have been experiments done reproducing it up to the "protein formation" step. Anything more complex than that is likely going to take too much time to result in a new lifeform - especially one that could survive ex-vitro.
Even staying within materialism, it isn't clear that 'everything is physics'. For example, our computers operate according to the laws of physics, but the physical laws tell us nothing about how they operate. To understand how computers operate, we need to know a lot of extra information besides the physical laws. In other words, physical laws tell us nothing about physical conditions. This is why there are many other scientific disciplines besides physics. So, since this notion of 'everything is physics' doesn't even work within materialism, it is hard to see why it would exclude immaterial entities.
And as you point out, the notion that Darwinian mechanisms can account for evolution of complexity and diversity is pure speculation. Which is why modern evolution theory does not use Darwin's theories. It uses mechanisms that we can see operating in the lab and in bioinformatics, such as bacterial horizontal gene transfer and empirically calculated substitution matrices. And the further that bioinformatic algorithms diverge from Darwin's ideas, the better they perform.
There's a difference between the physical laws (that we know) and the "domain of physics". There's a great deal we don't yet know about physics that's nevertheless within its domain.
Not everything is in the domain of physics. "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" is not in the domain of physics. However, physics (or its subsets chemistry and biology) can explain how life may have emerged.
Physics can't rule out that a god snapped his godfingers 5000 years ago and made it all appear the way that it does now. It can't rule out an immortal soul. It can't rule out that we're in a simulation, or that unobservable fairies are actually behind all the forces in the universe. For those cases, I like to apply Occam's Razor - not because it's true, but because it's practical.
> And as you point out, the notion that Darwinian mechanisms can account for evolution of complexity and diversity is pure speculation.
Random mutation and natural selection do result in complexity and diversity. This is a fact, not speculation. You can try it at home, on your computer. We do have genetic algorithms working on those exact principles. They're generally not preferable to more informed algorithms, because they're slow, but they do work.
> It uses mechanisms that we can see operating in the lab and in bioinformatics, such as bacterial horizontal gene transfer and empirically calculated substitution matrices. And the further that bioinformatic algorithms diverge from Darwin's ideas, the better they perform.
As we can see from computer simulation, pure selection and mutation is inefficient. If nature can find a shortcut mechanism that "Darwinian evolution" itself does not account for, it's not surprising that it would become a dominating factor. However, what makes you believe that such a mechanism itself could not possibly arise from natural selection and random mutation? Is it the improbability? It's a big universe, you know. We're not even talking about the probability of this happening on all planets, but on any planet in the universe.
I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws.
As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored.
No, but you're made up of the pieces that come from the hamburger.
I get that it may be comforting to think that you are, fundamentally, some incorporeal, magical entity both special and immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... but there's no evidence for this.
It seems like all the evidence is for this, and on the other hand there is no evidence for the materiality of the mind. The only reason people believe in mind == brain is due to their materialistic fundamentalism, just like the creationists force their theories onto science.
And what causes the intelligence that is simply being channeled by such a brain? Is it turtles all the way down?
Let me counter your position with another: the brain is that which protects the body and the genes. Essentially it means to find food, safety and make babies. But in order to do that we have evolved society, language, culture and technology. It's still simply a fight for life against entropy. The brain learns what actions lead to best rewards and what actions and situations are dangerous. And if it doesn't, then death acts like a filter and improves the next generation of intelligent agents to make them more attuned to survival. And it all stems from self replication in an environment shared with many other agents and limited resources.
You see, my short explanation covers the origin, purpose and evolution of intelligence. The 'brain is an antenna' would work only if you consider the constraints of the environment as the source and the brain as the 'receiver' of signals.
Your short explanation is full of unfounded speculation, whereas my even shorter explanation relies entirely on direct evidence everyone has access to. The only reason you feel your explanation gets a pass is because you speculate in the name of materialism, which in itself is an incoherent philosophy.
I'm pretty sure I've never even heard of such evidence, let alone seen any. Philosophy is irrelevant here; what do you propose does the thinking if not the brain? Where is the direct evidence you claim?
Consciousness, free will, abstract thought, mathematics. All things that cannot be reduced to matter. All our scientific theories are filtered through all or most of the above, so the above list is much more directly evidenced than anything the sciences say.
What do you propose does the thinking if not the brain?
The only one of those things with a concrete definition is mathematics, which we can do with computers in practice or in principle (I am a mathematician). Computers are made of matter.
Computers do not do mathematics. Rather, they compute a set of rules we give them, which may or may not be consistent. It is up to the programmer to give them rules that are consistent and correspond to some abstract mathematical concept. However, the computational rules themselves are not mathematics.
I am not sure what does the thinking, but whatever it is, it cannot be the brain if thinking consists of uncomputable and non physical faculties.
That's a rather strange and nebulous "definition" of mathematics, and quite contrary to how it actually works; the rules define the abstract concepts that build mathematics, and the rules are followed by people too whenever they do maths, because they are the maths. For example, "numbers" are an abstract mathematical concept, totally unphysical, defined purely by rules, and used by people and computers. Actual mathematics can certainly be done with computers, and is, every day, by mathematicians (among others).
There's nothing demonstrably uncomputable or unphysical about thinking. On the contrary, the brain is an enormously complex network of neurons and synapses, clearly intricate enough to physically perform all known mind functions, and all in principle simulatable on a powerful enough computer system. Your magical antenna idea has no basis in reality, it is massively outweighed by real-world evidence, and you have failed to present any actual evidence to support it.
I cited a number of first hand pieces of evidence that are more directly evident to everyone than the speculation you provide, and you accuse me of not providing any evidence. I guess there is nothing further to be said.
- I defined consciousness in a concrete way. it's adaptation to environment based on reinforcement learning and designed by evolution, for survival
- free will - it's just as real as 1000 angels dancing on a pinhead. Nothing is beyond physical. If it has an effect in this world, it's physical. If it doesn't, then it's just fantasy. Philosophers have tried to settle the 'mind body problem' for hundreds of years and finally conceded that dualism is a misguided path. What you consider free will is just randomness (stochastic neural activity) filtered through experience.
- abstract thought - a form of data compression, useful for survival. We use abstractions in order to compress experience in a way that can be applied to novel situations. It would be too difficult to learn the best action for each situation, especially that many situations are novel. So we model the world, compute future outcomes before acting, then act. If it were not so we would never get to learn to drive a car because it would take too many crashes to learn driving the hard way. But we learn to drive without dying 1000 times, and we do many things with few mistakes because we can model in an abstract way the consequences of our current situation and actions.
- mathematics - a useful model we rely on, but it's not absolute. It could be formulated in different ways, the current formulation is not the only possible one, nor is irreducible to matter. It all started when people had more sheep to count than fingers on their hands. The rest is a gradual buildup of model creation.
You are attached to a kind of transcendental thinking which is just too burdensome on Occam's razor. You presuppose much more than necessary. Human experience can be explained by the continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by effects and learning from the outcomes.
Perception is a form of representation of sensorial information in an efficient and useful way. Judgement is the evaluation of the current situation and possible actions (based on instinct and past experience). Acting is just learned reflex controlled by judgement. They are all actually implemented in neural networks. They process information in a loop with the environment.
You don't need any transcendental presupposition to understand consciousness, free will, abstract thought and mathematics. Sorry to be so blunt, but we're evolving past medieval thinking into the bright future of AI, and many things that seemed magical and transcendental have been proven to be just learning (error minimisation).
I have been like you once, a zealot of spiritual thinking. After many decades and life experiences now I have a much better way to grasp the situation. I don't rely on magic or divinity or anything that surpassed the physical in the way I see the world. You probably will come around at some point and realise how little explanative power you had in the old theories, and that the new way of thinking is actually just as poetic as the old one. Nothing was lost, you don't need to defend the old ways. If you'd decide to learn more about AI, RL and game theory you will be able to philosophically appreciate the wonders of life even more than now. Thousands of years of spiritual tradition stand in contradiction to billions of years of evidence from evolution and the amazing progress of the last decades in understanding the way things work.
The evidence is literally the very things by which we perceive all other scientific evidence: consciousness, abstract thought, mathematics. All three are clearly non physical. People have to make up elaborate, incoherent explanations to try and explain how they are physical. The fact it is so hard, even impossible, to do shows the items are not physical.
Consciousness is clearly nonphysical? No offense, but that's simply nonsense. Why is consciousness modified by drugs? Why can consciousness be damaged by physical trauma? When you can interact with something in the physical world, that is a pretty strong indication that you're dealing with a physical phenomenon
In fact, it's not even clear what a "non-physical" phenomenon is if you drill deep enough. The existance of abstractions doesn't change granular reality. For example, a neural network implemented on a computer is highly abstracted, but still implemented on physical silicon.
I suggest you look up the philisophical history of dualism - you're a bit behind.
Yes - your computer analogy conflated me (a human person, existing in the physical world) with a nonphysical intelligence, of which we have no evidence and which isn't even characterized in a meaningful way - it's just a placeholder for "mystical stuff I feel but don't understand".
If you want to say you believe what you do on faith, or that it's your own spiritual belief and therefore none of my business, I won't begrudge you that and I won't bother you about it. You seem to be asserting, however, that there exists empirical evidence of non-corporeal souls (though you didn't use this word). I disagree on that point, vigorously.
Not quite. Your counter argument is "doing things to the brain affects our mind, which shows our mind is physical." The analogy I offer shows that the fact doing something to X affects Y does not mean that X is Y.
So, the evidence you offer that the mind is physical does not actually show the mind is physical.
Physical and nonphysical are beside the point. The point is X influences Y does not mean Y is X.
My claim is that Y is not X.
You argue that X influences Y, therefore Y is X.
I provide a counter example that shows you cannot infer Y is X just because X influences Y. You need another premise to demonstrate from your example that Y is X.
I see, you want to (poorly and incompletely) reduce my points to a syllogism, and point out that I'm not formally proving the physical nature of the mind (which is more appropriately addressed by the last few hundred years of science than a toy logic problem).
Meanwhile, you have not presented any evidence or argument (or even actual definition) of your magical antenna hypothesis.
"You can't falsify my unfalsifyable hypothesis, therefore it must be true" is not reason, especially when your hypothesis is in no way needed to explain the oberved phenomena (and is, in fact, inconsistent with all empirical observation).
You don't get to play stupid word games and declare that therefore magic is real.
Or rather, you do, but rational people will feel free to ignore you, as I am about to do.
