Funny, this lesion didnt even hurt my brain, but still, my behaviour changed. I wonder what would have happened to me if i had a torn stucked into my head, id rethink a lot of stuff, would probably change my mind and personality somehow…

You have a very limited appreciation of sex if you think it is pleasurable only because of nerve endings in certain areas of the body.

I certainly don’t, but then again, I’m not a materialist.

A true materialist cannot believe that things can be experienced outside of neural activity. For something to be perceived by a person (or any creature, for that matter), it must first be detected in some way by sensory organs and transmitted to the brain via neurons.

To imply some sort of transcendence from a pleasurable act denies materialism.

Now, to state that “[s]ex is pleasurable because individuals who take pleasure in it tend to leave more offspring” is to skip a whole bunch of neural engineering that must occur for this to be true. It’s a circular argument, hence my “chicken-and-egg” statement.

It’s also untrue. Microorganisms, which make up most of the biomass on the planet, have no brain so they can’t experience any pleasure or pain. The asexual ones reproduce just as fast or faster than the sexual ones. Thornhill and Palmer have told us that rape (definitely unpleasant sex) evolved and continues to exist in all human cultures because it was more successful from an overall evolutionary viewpoint than courtship was.

As a materialist, you surely agree with this, correct?

I had not met the man before this event, but it is hard to imagine he had the same personality before the shot went off.

Also, I have not studied psychology.

That being said, in the case illustrated by O’Leary, she does make some very good points. The best, in my view, is this:

I have written for newspapers most of my adult life, and one thing I know is this: Printing more copies of any type of information does not make it true. It makes it more widely disseminated.

Indeed, even first person accounts of qualitatively described events are as much a reflection of the accounter’s bias as they are of the events being recounted.

You have a very limited appreciation of sex if you think it is pleasurable only because of nerve endings in certain areas of the body.

Sex is pleasurable because individuals who take pleasure in it tend to leave more offspring.

Sex is pleasurable because a certain number of nerve endings are in certain areas of the body.

Thus you present a chicken-and-egg sort of problem.

angryoldfatman, the case is similar in that in both cases the amount of brain loss is guessed at rather than measured

What better measure is there besides the brain scans? You can see with your own eyes what the scan shows.

I can’t tell you how many times I was shown Terri Shiavo’s brain scans as an example of consciousness being directly related to brain tissue. Her scans showed much more brain tissue than these pitiful things. And we all remember her state, and that she was starved and dehydrated to death because she didn’t have enough brain to think. I guess Mr. French Social Worker needs to be euthanized ASAP.

but in the Lancet study even that guess shows less loss than the older study.

No it doesn’t.

Such cases support high developmental plasticity in the brain rather than an immaterial mind.

Are you telling us the current scientific dogma about us being born with all of the brain cells we’ll ever have is wrong? If not, why do we have so much useless brain matter?

Look at Phineas Gage, for example. How much of his brain did he lose, and yet he went on to perform as well or better than human beings possessing all of the brain matter they were born with?

following your logic why did we evolve a craving for cocaine, heroin, caffeine, nicotine, sex (for pleasure), ambulence chasing (adrenaline?), kleptomania (again adrenaline maybe?)

You’re lumping a lot of things together there. Sex is pleasurable because individuals who take pleasure in it tend to leave more offspring. The reward system in the brain that makes sex (and eating and socializing and music) pleasurable can be directly stimulated by drugs, which is why addictions occur.

How does evolutionary theory demonstrate empirically the survival benefits of these addictions?

Addictions are not beneficial, though the reward system that gives rise to them is.

You mention evolving a tendency? I’m not being facetious here. But how does a tendency evolve, a craving? What are the mechanisms? I find it to be an unsurmountable problem for TOE.

Back to the sex example. Imagine you have a population of animals. Some of them like sex and engage in it often. The others hate sex and avoid it at all costs. Which group will leave more offspring, on average? What will happen to the population over time? Repeat this over many generations, and your population evolves a craving for sex — just like humans.

More so, how about suicide? In this case NS doesn’t even have a chance to raise its club in protest. How does an organism know 1) that it is unfit and 2)that it should terminate itself for the good of the group?

I’m not sure where you got the idea that organisms commonly do either of those things. Could you elaborate?

mentok [31], that article almost three decades old. As the article admits, the scans of the time were pretty poor and ambiguous. What does the much better current scanning technology say about such cases?

The article mentok linked also mentioned a practically identical case from 2 years ago, with pictures of the scans. I linked earlier in the thread to a New Scientist article about the same case.

The phenomenon can’t be dismissed as just a mistake or an urban legend.