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.

> if the brain is an antenna for intelligence

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.

Well, I guess that's that :)

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.

> Consciousness, free will, abstract thought, mathematics

- 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.

How can you falsify your physicalist explanations?

Brain functions under electromagnetic shielding, so are you proposing some new physical force?

I'm proposing the mind is non physical and interacts with the physical brain, analogous to a signal and antenna.