That’s the title of a new article at the Patheos website, which describes itself as “the world’s homepage for all religion”. The article is the first in a series by Ted Peters, emeritus professor of theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, who understands the threat that materialism (aka physicalism) poses to traditional religious views regarding the self.
There are quite a few misconceptions in the article (and in the others in the series), but I think it’s a good springboard for continuing the discussion we’ve been having in CharlieM’s Body, Soul, and Spirit thread.
A taste:
Did I lose my mind to science? Actually, it was stolen. Who are the thieves? The thieves are the scientific materialists who have eliminated from our cosmology everything that is mental, conscious, meaningful, spiritual, and ideal. You’ll recognize the thieves when you hear them mutter, “the mind is only the brain, ya know.”
CharlieM:
Give me a break, Charlie. Is this some kind of pedantic dodge, like saying “It isn’t immaterial, it’s nonphysical”? Or “Steiner doesn’t call it a soul, he calls it a ‘divine galactic excrescence'”? Or “It isn’t separate, it’s part of a unified whole”? Corneel’s “whack-a-soul” comment was spot on.
You know perfectly well that the Alzheimer’s argument applies directly to your position, which is why you’ve been defending against it. Don’t try to turn around and say “You know that argument you’ve been making? The one I’ve repeatedly tried to defend against? It doesn’t apply to me. Sorry for the late notice.”
I can’t decide whether you’re trying to fool us or yourself. Maybe you feel that if you can convince yourself that the argument doesn’t apply to you, that will make it OK for you to continue believing in the soul. Problem is, the argument does apply to you.
Pedantic dodges aren’t an escape hatch.
CharlieM:
Correct, and I’m not aware of anyone here who claims otherwise.
The issue isn’t whether your thoughts and feelings are themselves physical, it’s whether the entity that produces those thoughts and feelings is physical. You claim that it isn’t, which means you run headlong into the arguments that physicalists make (including the Alzheimer’s argument).
It leaves you, and all of us, in an excellent position to deal with the question at hand. The Alzheimer’s argument does not depend on the arcana of nuclear physics.
CharlieM:
It’s a valid question, and I don’t think anyone has a good answer yet (though there are some competent philosophers and neuroscientists who claim they do, and I don’t dismiss their arguments out of hand). Once again, however, you can ask the same question of the dualist. Why is it necessary for the soul to be conscious?
Right, and I do so because all too often, dualists ask a question of physicalists thinking that if the physicalist can’t answer, the case for dualism is somehow strengthened. That isn’t true if the dualist can’t answer the question either.
Neil,
Since you still believe that geocentrism and heliocentrism are mathematically equivalent, I thought I would offer an explanation of why that is wrong.
Below are two orbital diagrams of Earth, Venus, and the Sun, one illustrating the geocentric view and the other the heliocentric. The goal is to superimpose one over the other so that the positions of all three bodies in the geocentric model match their positions in the heliocentric model. You’re allowed to change the overall scale and the relative size of the orbits, and you’re allowed to ‘run’ each model to achieve a desired configuration.
It is possible to achieve a match, for example by choosing configurations in which Earth, Venus, and the Sun appear in that order in a straight line. So go ahead and run the models, scale them appropriately, and line things up so that each celestial body is superimposed on its counterpart in the other model. So far so good.
We’re interested in relative motion, so pick one of the three bodies as the “anchor” and keep that body lined up with its counterpart. Allow both models to run. You will quickly see that the path followed by at least one of the other two bodies diverges from the path followed by its counterpart in the other model. Since the paths do not match, the equations describing those paths do not match either. And since the equations do not match, the models aren’t mathematically equivalent.
,
If you have trouble visualizing the exercise, there’s an easier way to convince yourself that the paths diverge. Simply note that Venus moves around the Sun in the heliocentric diagram, whereas in the geocentric model it moves around an empty point on the line between Earth and the Sun.
“Did I lose my mind to science?”
I have no issue with anyone losing his or her mind to science…unless it ain’t true…
Think about that, keiths. You are not a stupid man. What if the science you worship is false, or, corrupted?
What if your whole faith in science has been devoted to fake assumptions?
Can you dig it?
J-Mac:
I don’t worship science, and I aim for justified faith, not the blind faith too often employed by religious believers.
By ‘fake assumptions’ I assume you actually mean ‘false assumptions’. My answer is that it’s always possible that some of my assumptions or your assumptions or anyone’s assumptions are false. That’s part of the human condition.
The best way to deal with that, in my opinion, is to keep an open mind. Be aware that your assumptions might be false and be prepared to evaluate evidence that might demonstrate this. Also consider alternative assumptions to see if their implications fit better with reality than those derived from your own assumptions.
Your comment makes me curious. How do you deal with the fact that your assumptions might be false?
None of the neurophilosophers who identify as “eliminative materialists” deny the reality of consciousness. Churchland’s project is geared towards eliminativism about propositional attitudes as a theory of semantic content in favor of semantics based on artificial neural networks. He doesn’t think that consciousness can be eliminated, and neither did Rorty, Feyerabend, or anyone else who marched under that banner.
Also, eliminative materialism was originally conceived of as an alternative to mind-brain identity. But such minor details are of no concern to a culture holy warrior like Peters.
KN:
In fairness to Peters, there actually are philosophers and neuroscientists who deny consciousness (specifically phenomenal consciousness). Think Keith Frankish on the philosophical side and Michael Graziano* on the neuroscientific side. Such people exist, but Peters mistakenly thinks that their view is the default view among the neuro folks.
Here’s Frankish (from his website):
From a Graziano piece in the New York Times Sunday Review:
* I did an OP on Graziano’s views back in 2014:
Michael Graziano: Are We Really Conscious?
Perhaps he is emphasizing the fact that these materialists look at the everyday world of our senses, see objects interacting with each other, and then describe subatomic ‘particles’ in a way that gives the impression that they are no different from the everyday objects. That if they were enlarged to the point where they could be observed directly, they wouldn’t seem very different from the visible objects around us. Is this not the impression most school kids get when they are first taught about these things? These things are not real for the senses in the way that a tree or a cow is real.
Hmm. I’m not sure a reasonable working definition of consciousness exists. I’ve been looking at what Rorty has to say about “consciousness” and I sense, if not denial, certainly scepticism.
keiths,
The comments section is a hoot. Happy days!
Cause and effect are a lot easier to untangle regarding the interactions of mechanical systems than they are regarding living systems.
How do we untangle the correlations and causes involved in the instigation of my actions in answering this post? Did my brain decide to focus my attention on the words in your post and ignore the activity going on around me? Did it cause me to manipulate my laptop? Did it form the thoughts I have transferred to the screen? Did it make the decision between clicking or not on ‘post comment’? How does it coordinate all this activity?
My brain is a key component without which I could not be conscious of, or function, during these processes. My laptop, the machine allowing me to connect to the internet, is also a key component. But neither of these are causal agents here, I am.
By ‘correction’ do you mean altering my beliefs so that they come closer to agreeing with your beliefs? 🙂
Alan:
I had forgotten about a couple of the funny moments in that thread. There was Neil’s announcement:
keiths, to petrushka:
Neil:
keiths:
Neil:
Then a quote from Graziano about a cranial squirrel:
This part reminded me of CharlieM:
CharlieM:
If that’s what he’s saying, then he is once again misrepresenting the views of the “scientific materialists”, who accept quantum physics and decidedly do not believe that subatomic particles behave no differently from everyday objects.
keiths,
Yes, there are several insightful comments in that thread that made me smile. I’d encourage anyone reading here to dip in.
CharlieM:
Yes to all of those. We know that the brain does those sorts of things, we know that damage to the brain disrupts them, and we have no reason to think that anything beyond the brain is required in order to carry out those things. Do you have any evidence that the brain cannot perform those tasks? Why invoke an immaterial soul/spirit/mind/thetan/divine-galactic-excrescence when there’s no evidence for it and plenty of evidence against it?
Neuroscientists are working out the details of that. That’s what brain research is for. A reminder, though: You have no idea how the immaterial soul/spirit/mind/thetan/divine-galactic-excrescence coordinates all this activity, either. The fact that physicalists haven’t fully answered the question does not strengthen the dualist case.
Don’t neglect the possibility that you are a causal agent whose brain carries out those activities. To put it more simply, the fact that your brain produces a thought doesn’t mean that the thought isn’t yours.
Where did I argue that thinking cannot be a physical process?
Here is my understanding of Steiner’s take on thinking which I believe to be perfectly reasonable. Percepts, by which he means the entities which we perceive and not the act of perceiving, enter my consciousness. This is the world of appearance. I think of the concepts which belong to the percepts. Reality is apprehended by reconnecting percept and concept, which due to my makeup I first apprehend separately. For example I remember the time when my granddaughter first encountered a gas hotplate. We were in the kitchen and my wife turned on a gas ring. My granddaughter jumped back and shouted ‘fire’. Up to that point, all she had known were the induction hot plates, but she did have a concept of fire. She could see the hotplate and I presume she recognized it as a cooking device. It was there in front of her as a percept but she had no concept of gas hotplates. Now she is familiar with this method of cooking. She recognizes the percept and concept united in the object.
There is one aspect of reality that is unique in that I experience it together and not as separate percept and concept. That is thinking. The percept and concept have always been united in my consciousness.
Here are a couple of Steiner quotes on materialism and thinking. I make no apologies for filling this post up with Steiner quotes as I am not forcing anyone to read them. Those who are not interested can just skip over them.
Steiner:
And,
Steiner:
I experience my thinking directly and to attribute it to brain processes or to originate in some spiritual realm floating who knows where are both unnecessary speculations. It is me who initiates my thoughts even if the entities that enter my thoughts do not belong to me.
I might perceive a triangle drawn on paper. I recognize it as a triangle because my intuition gives me the concept triangle. The concept is no more part of me than the percept. The threefoldness of a triangle does not depend on me just because I hold this concept. It belongs to all triangles.
keiths,
I don’t think Frankish would deny that we’re conscious. He would deny that there are qualia, which is a different notion. More specifically, he would deny that introspection tells us what consciousness is. He worries that introspection fuels the illusion that there are qualia.
Here it’s important to notice that Frankish follows Chalmers’s conception of qualia very closely. This matters because most people who haven’t read Chalmers think that qualia just are conscious states, and that denying qualia is the same as denying that there are conscious states or episode at all.
Third-rate hacks like Peters thrive on such confusions.
Chalmers defines qualia as conscious states that are completely separate from all psychological and biological structures and functions.
Now, how do we know that there are such things at all? Because, Chalmers tells, we can conceive of zombies. If we can conceive of zombies, then zombies are logically possible. This means that not all mental states can be explained in terms of psychological and biological structures and functions. The ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ is precisely that of understanding conscious states that are completely separate from all psychological and biological structures and functions.
As I understand it, Frankish isn’t denying that there are conscious states and episodes — what he’s denying is that phenomenal consciousness is separable from psychological and biological processes and functions. And since it seems to be separable because introspection shows it to be, he denies the reliability of introspection.
I might be reading too much Dennett into Frankish, but that’s my understanding of his position.
KN:
He’s actually denying phenomenal consciousness altogether. I quoted his website earlier:
He did a presentation called “The Case Against Consciousness” and wrote an Aeon article titled “The Consciousness Illusion” with this subtitle:
That’s pretty unambiguous.
Although he denies phenomenal consciousness, he wouldn’t deny that we are conscious of things in a purely informational sense (what Ned Block called ‘access consciousness’). If I ask you to pass the salt, you reach for the shaker because you are conscious of its presence on the table in front of you. Frankish would be fine with that, but he would deny that your felt experience of the brownness of the shaker was real. The knowledge of the brownness is there, but the felt experience is illusory. The felt brownness is a quale, and he denies the existence of qualia, as you noted above.
I doubt that Peters is aware of the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness , but I’m sure that Frankish’s denial of phenomenal consciousness would be enough to raise his ire and start him muttering about how his consciousness had been stolen.
CharlieM:
Christ, Charlie. Take a position and stick to it. The Alzheimer’s argument shows that thinking is a physical process, and you’ve been arguing against it.
What kind of a dodge is it going to be this time? Will you tell us that you’re fine with the idea that “sense-bound thinking” is a physical process, but that other kinds of thinking aren’t, so you haven’t really denied that thinking can be a physical process? Some other dodge?
We’ve been talking about thinking that clearly isn’t sense-bound, such as telling time, naming ten animals, remembering your daughter’s name, etc. Alzheimer’s patients have difficulty with these and similar things. If those activities are carried out by some immaterial thingamajig, as you believe, then they shouldn’t be affected by the brain damage that Alzheimer’s causes.
Your counterargument was that the brain’s role is to feed sensory information to the thingamajig, which does the actual thinking, and that the Alzheimer’s-associated brain damage was causing the sensory information to be garbled, thus confusing the thingamajig. The thingamajig itself wasn’t damaged, it was simply confused.
You also argued that the thingamajig was sending commands to the body via the brain, and that those were being garbled so that the body was not doing what the thingamajig wanted. So again, the thingamajig was fine, but the Alzheimer’s-associated brain damage was screwing things up.*
You were arguing against the idea that the activities in question — time-telling, naming ten animals, recalling your daughter’s name, and others — were physical processes carried out by the brain. Please own up to that.
* For any readers who haven’t been following the thread, my refutation has been to point to evidence that doesn’t fit Charlie’s model. One example:
CharlieM:
You’ve already attributed thinking to the soulish thingamajig, so it’s a bit too late to back out now. Look, I get it. You’re faced with an argument showing that the thingamajig isn’t real. You can’t refute the argument. You desperately want the thingamajig to exist because your Steinerian worldview depends on it. You’re looking for ways out of the conundrum, and you’ve seized on the idea of saying “Oh, this debate doesn’t really matter. It’s just speculation anyway.”
It won’t work. Alzheimer’s is real. The brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s is real. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s are real. The logic behind the argument is real. None of it is speculative, and it shows clearly that the soulish thingamajig does not exist. The Alzheimer’s argument (along with many others) shows that you and Steiner are wrong, and that remains true even if you find it upsetting.
Yes, you initiate your thoughts. You are a physical being who uses his brain for the purpose of thinking. The soulish thingamajig is not involved, because it simply doesn’t exist.
CharlieM, quoting Steiner:
There’s some weird anthropomorphizing going on in that last sentence, reminiscent of Steiner’s tomato comments. Setting that aside, Steiner seems to be asking “How is it possible for matter to reflect on itself?” My first response would be to ask why he thinks it wouldn’t be possible for matter to reflect on itself. What properties of matter rule that out as a possibility?
Matter in certain configurations can be used as a bottle opener; in others it cannot. Matter in certain configurations can be used to receive television broadcasts; in others it cannot. Matter in certain configurations can reflect on itself; in others it cannot. Particles can’t open bottles, receive television broadcasts, or reflect on themselves, but particular configurations of particles can do those things. What’s the problem?
Steiner again:
That statement simply assumes that thoughts are separate from brain activity. Well, if you assume that materialism is false, it isn’t terribly surprising when you conclude that materialism is false. Not exactly a sound argument, however.
Well, duh. It’s also possible to speak about travel without entering the domain of automotive technology at the same time. Steiner’s point?
Heh. He’s saying “If you can’t overcome materialism, you won’t be able to enter the same exalted state as I, in which the immaterial nature of thinking becomes clear.” In other words, you have to take Steiner’s word on it and reject materialism purely on faith, and then you will magically be able to perceive that materialism is false. Um, thanks, Rudolf, but I would prefer an actual argument in favor of the position you are urging upon me.
I’m not making models, I am just relating that way I see things from personal experience.
No, that’s not what I believe. I believe that I think. In fact I would go so far as to say I know I think. I see four classes of entity in the world, physical substance, living substance, sentient beings, and self-conscious individuals that can think about the past, present and future. I am here feeling and thinking because I am a self-conscious, sentient being comprising of physical non-living and living substance. I designate my sentience as my soul nature and my self-consciousness as my ego. At no time have I ever been just physical substance, I have existed as a complete organism since my conception.
I believe a damaged brain can affect thinking, feeling, memory and much else besides. It all depends on which area of the brain is damaged. I do use my brain in my everyday thinking life, but this produces the dead thoughts of the intellect. I am capable of a more living thinking, but this requires me to follow a path of selfless dedication such as the Buddhist eightfold path. The easiest option is to continue with my brain bound dead thoughts.
If you are referring to Steiner’s version of the composition of the human being, no it doesn’t fit. Steiner spoke about the intimate connection between the nerve system and the sentient ‘body’ and the blood and the ego. He regarded the nerves and blood as expressions of the sentient ‘body’ and the ego respectively. We can see a demonstration of the latter when a person becomes extremely self-conscious and the rush of blood causes their face to turn red.
I could see garbled visual inputs arriving at the brain if the optic nerve was damaged. In that case the person would try to make the best sense of what appeared to them in their visual field.
We could say that the brain causes my thinking in the same way that my fingers cause me to type this on my keyboard. In communicating I use my mind, my brain, my muscles, my memory and possibly my breath. It’s a joint effort but I am the directing agent.
I’m not sure I see the difference. surely recognizing the 2 and the 8 are acts of cognition.
It must have been a difficult time for you and your family. Especially if she was suffering during the covid restrictions.
Brain damage is significant to me also, being very close to someone who has suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. Thankfully the permanent damage was much lighter than it could have been.
In my opinion our ego consciousness, which includes memory, depends on the brain, so her behaviour was perfectly understandable.
I’m not sure where I implied that the soul gets its sensory input directly and reliably without the need for a brain and sense organs.
I claimed that, unlike the brain, the mind is not a physical object bounded by space and time. I do receive inner perceptions of the world around me, but in my opinion these are indirect mental pictures.
I contend that direct perception is achieved by taking in what I become aware of through the senses and combining this with the associated concepts gained through inner intuitions. Only then does the mind apprehend reality directly.
I am aware of myself and I understand that there is a brain of sorts inside my skull.
Not:
I am a brain and I understand that I sit inside a bony case.
Do you agree that a straight line is essentially two dimensional?
No, that is your assumption. I’ve being arguing against the brain as the creator of thoughts.
Does my heart create feelings? After all a state of over excitement is correlated to an increase in my heart rate.
CharlieM:
It’s hard to keep up with the Charlie-go-round. Your position seems to change on a daily basis. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism: when faced with an argument you can’t refute, simply change to a new position and claim that that was what you meant all along.
Let’s recap. I introduced the Alzheimer’s example and explained how Alzheimer’s symptoms show that thinking is carried out by the brain, and not by a putative soul. You disagreed with that position and began arguing against it.
1. Your first gambit was to propose that Alzheimer’s damages the brain’s ability to deliver uncorrupted sensory information to the soul (or the “I”, or the “mind”, or whatever term you’re using at the moment). Faced with garbled sensory input, the soul/I/mind/thingamajig (henceforth ‘SIMT’) becomes confused and Alzheimer’s symptoms are the result.
I pointed out that your hypothesis doesn’t make sense, because a) the patients don’t complain of garbled sensory input, b) they don’t show signs of garbled sensory input, and c) garbled sensory input wouldn’t cause symptoms we see, like drawing a blank when asked to name 10 animals or being unable to tell time.
2. Your next gambit was to posit that the problem was on the output side, and that commands from the SIMT to the body via the brain were being corrupted because of the Alzheimer’s damage. The result being that the body wasn’t doing what the SIMT wanted.
That hypothesis doesn’t make sense either, for a number of reasons. One example I gave was of an Alzheimer’s patient trying to read a clock that says 2:40. The patient can see that the little hand points to the 2 and the big hand points to the 8. That shows that the input side is working. They can also tell you that the little hand points to the 2 and the big hand points to the 8. That shows that the output side is working. The patient knows where the hands are pointing but cannot tell you what the time is. The problem is not with the input or output, it’s with the cognition that occurs in between. Alzheimer’s disrupts the time-telling ability, which shows that the cognitive feat of translating hand positions into time is not carried out by the putative SIMT. It’s done by the brain.
Your two counterarguments failed, and you haven’t come up with a third. It’s time to acknowledge that you cannot refute the Alzheimer’s argument and that the SIMT you were arguing for — one that does the thinking, makes the decisions, issues commands to the body, etc. — does not exist. The evidence rules it out.
Instead of acknowledging that, you’ve just quietly changed your position without announcing the reversal. You’re now telling us that
Since “It’s now 8:40” is presumably one of those “dead thoughts of the intellect”, you are acknowledging that it’s the brain, not the SIMT, that tells time. You’ve changed your position.
Which is fine! Changing your position in response to a compelling argument is a good thing, much to be applauded. What isn’t so great is changing your position while pretending you aren’t. Why not openly acknowledge the change and the reason for it?
Regarding the clock example, you wrote:
I’m fine with calling them acts of cognition, but whether they are or not does not affect the argument. You’re missing (or possibly evading) the point, which I will once again restate. The patient looks at the clock. They correctly see the positions of the hands, which means that the sensory path is working. They correctly report the positions of the hands, which means that the motor system is working. The problem isn’t with either of those, it’s with the cognitive process that occurs between input and output — namely, the conversion of knowledge about the positions of the hands into knowledge of the actual time. The brain does it, not the SIMT, which is why Alzheimer’s disrupts it.
CharlieM:
keiths:
CharlieM:
And the Charlie-go-round continues to revolve…
This sounds like either confusion or another pedantic dodge. You’re telling us that the brain is the organ of thought but that it isn’t the creator of thoughts. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
The Alzheimer’s evidence shows that it’s the brain, not the SIMT, that creates thoughts such as “It’s now 8:40”. The brain does create thoughts, and you are wrong to claim otherwise.
I was stating a possibility, I wasn’t proposing an exclusive reason why brain damage might produce these results. But I haven’t given your reasoning as much thought as I should have done.
I would agree that the problem of telling the time is a cognition problem. Before the brain damage they were able to match the percept with the concept of clock hands and numerical symbols and also with the concepts related to the correlation of clocks and time. After the brain damage they have lost their awareness of some of these concepts.
I don’t see why from this you infer that it is the brain that is doing the thinking. I still maintain that it’s the ‘I’ that uses the brain in thinking, and the brain damage disrupts the person’s ability to retrieve specific concepts which relate to the percept or to each other. The person has become more limited in the way they can use their brain.
Taking our lead from Aristotle in relation to the brain: The brain matter is the material cause, the formal cause is how the brain is constructed out of the material, the efficient cause is the development of the body to which the brain belongs, and the final cause is the I which inhabits the body.
Perhaps my thinking is a bit too flexible for some people’s liking. 🙂 Some would wish that life conformed to the straight forward causal connections as seen in physics.
It would be helpful if it was pointed out to me exactly where I argued against the brain being the organ of thought. I use my stomach and intestines to process food and drink in order to maintain bodily functions, and I use my brain and sense organs to process incoming data in order to maintain mind activity.
If a sighted woman lived in a community that had been blind all of their lives, she would have empirical evidence of the visual world that satisfies herself, but would she be able to convince her fellow community members?
In this game “thought” is sometimes “mind activity” or “sense perception” but it may change its shape at any time. Somebody accuses you of denying that thought requires a brain? O-ho! Please note that there are different levels of thinking. Sure, pure thinking can occur in the absence of neural activity. But of course we also need physical processes to process the sense data and this is also thinking, although it is different from pure thinking. What do you say? Why is it that disembodied souls can still see and hear fine without their senses? Well, that is because they use a higher type of perceiving sense data that does not require senses and does not need physical stimuli to be processed by brains.
This is what I call the game of whack-a-soul: You use criticisms merely as an excuse to fabulate new stories that accommodate the critique and you iterate this process indefinitely. You never seriously entertain the possibility that your explanation was wrong in the first place.
Are you saying that those who explain consciousness away as an illusion are not denying its reality?
The alternative being to try to avoid the word “mind” altogether – instead of mental processes there are supposedly just neural processes in the brain. It’s not really an alternative, but taking the mind-brain identity to its radical conclusion.
Until this year, KN used to be generally well-informed and accurate on philosophical matters, occasionally even insightful. But on this point, he is tendentious, to put it very generously.
Hopefully next year it improves from here.
CharlieM:
If a man were experiencing a squirrel in his head, would he be able to convince his fellow community members of the squirrel’s existence?
If a man knew from direct experience that there were “implant stations” on Venus and Mars, where “thetans” (souls) were reprogrammed after death, would he be able to convince the rest of society?
If a man — let’s call him “Rudolf” — discovered through “clairvoyant investigation” that electricity is a moral element of nature, would he be able to persuade the physicists?
Clearly these people are all correct. They have special access to realities to which others are completely blind. The lesson? Always trust your experiences. Your experiences are never, ever wrong. If it feels right, it is right.
What do you worship then, keiths?
Where do we draw the line? You are not a stupid man. You tell me…
keiths:
J-Mac:
The key word is ‘justified’. Justified faith is the kind of faith you have that your longtime, steadfast friend will show up for your wedding, as promised. You don’t know for sure that she’ll show up, but based on long experience with her, you have faith that she will.
Blind faith is the faith of a person who believes that Jesus actually cast demons out of a man and into pigs, all because it says so in a book that someone told them was the infallible word of God.
Nothing.
Corneel:
In his latest iteration, he has retreated even further. Now he concedes that he uses his brain for all of his everyday thinking, but he maintains that this only produces the “dead thoughts of the intellect”, not the “more living thinking” of those selfless folks who follow the eightfold path. This is exactly why I call it “the incredible shrinking soul”. As the discussion progresses, Charlie admits that the brain is responsible for more and more of the activity he had previously reserved for the soul. The soul steadily shrinks, and the process shows no sign of stopping before the soul vanishes in a puff of smoke.
CharlieM:
My brain doesn’t think; I use my brain to think.
My stomach and intestines don’t digest food; I use my stomach and intestines to digest food.
My heart doesn’t pump blood; I use my heart to pump blood.
(And yes, Charlie, I know about Steiner’s dumbass idea that the heart isn’t a pump.)
My neurons don’t maintain resting potentials, propagate action potentials, and reabsorb neurotransmitters that have been released into synapses; I use my neurons to maintain resting potentials, propagate action potentials, and reabsorb neurotransmitters that have been released into synapses.
Has the ridiculousness become apparent yet? How about this:
The transmission doesn’t transmit power from the engine to the driveshaft; the car uses the transmission to transmit power from the engine to the driveshaft.
I understand what you’re trying to do here, Charlie. You’re hoping to reserve a role for the “I” in mental life apart from the role already played by the brain. You want the “I”, not the brain, to be calling the shots. The problem is that you haven’t identified a single task in mental life that cannot be carried out by the brain without intervention from the mysterious “I”, which you take to be above and beyond the body. What exactly does the “I” do that isn’t done by the brain and the body? What is your evidence? When you say that the “I” uses the brain for thinking, how is that different from saying that the car uses the transmission for transmitting power to the driveshaft? There isn’t a car “soul” that sits above and beyond the parts of the car, reaching down and manipulating the transmission, and there isn’t a human soul (or “I”) that sits above and beyond the body and brain, reaching down and manipulating the brain.
CharlieM:
Look at how you are struggling to reserve a role for the “I” here beyond what the brain already does. You are trying to portray the brain’s role as merely “to match the percepts with the concepts” and, presumably, to deliver the concepts to the “I” for further cogitation. Your explanation doesn’t make sense. The Alzheimer’s patients haven’t lost their awareness of the concepts. They know what a clock is. They know that clocks can be used to tell time. They know that the position of the hands represents the time. They understand that which number a hand points to is relevant to determining the time. It isn’t that they’ve forgotten about these concepts or are unable to match them to percepts. The problem is that they can’t translate the hand positions into the actual time.
You know the classic “count backwards by three” sobriety test? The people who fail that test haven’t forgotten the concepts of number or of subtraction, and they aren’t having trouble matching those concepts to percepts. What’s happening is that they’re getting confused and screwing up the procedure itself. Why? Because the procedure is carried out by the brain, and the brain is impaired due to intoxication. The person can’t do it because the brain can’t do it, and the fact that the person can’t do it means that the soul can’t do it either. It’s interesting that our souls are incapable of simple arithmetic, isn’t it?
It doesn’t stop there, of course. Memory is impaired by Alzheimer’s, meaning that our souls can’t remember things on their own. Both the production and understanding of speech can be disrupted by damage to particular areas of the brain, meaning that the soul can’t produce or understand language on its own. The soul can’t name 10 animals or remember it’s own daughter’s name, as the Alzheimer’s evidence shows. It can’t tell time. The list goes on. What capacities does the soul retain, if any? See what I mean about “the incredible shrinking soul”?
What is the point of having such a useless soul? Suppose I tell you “The good news is that there is an afterlife. You have a soul which will live on after your body dies. The bad news is that your soul won’t be able to do much of anything. Its memories will be wiped out and it won’t be able to form new ones. Its capacity for language will vanish. It won’t be able to do even the simplest mental tasks. It won’t recognize or even remember your family members. It won’t…” As the list goes on, are you thinking “Yay! What a great afterlife!”?
What’s the point of an afterlife if all the good stuff dies along with your body, and all you’re left with is this soul that hung around uselessly while you were alive and is incapable of doing anything worthwhile now that you’re dead?
The truth, of course, is that there wasn’t a soul then, and there isn’t a soul now. The good stuff dies with your body because there is no soul within which it can live on.
Neil,
I’m hoping you’ve seen my comment and that you now understand why geocentrism and heliocentrism are not mathematically equivalent. If you’re still not convinced, I thought of a couple of things that might be leading to your confusion.
1. The geocentric and heliocentric coordinate systems are both perfectly legitimate, and the motion of an object can be expressed in either coordinate system. Depending on the task at hand, one or the other may be more convenient to use, but neither coordinate system is more correct than the other. However, you’ve tended to confuse the geocentric coordinate system with geocentrism and the heliocentric coordinate system with heliocentrism. The fact that both coordinate systems are legitimate might therefore be leading you to believe that both models are legitimate, which isn’t the case. The latter does not follow from the former. The predictions of geocentrism are vastly different from those of heliocentrism, so the two models cannot be mathematically equivalent.
2. During pre-telescopic times, the predictions of the two models matched observations equally well, roughly speaking. In fact, as you point out, the Ptolemaic system (geocentric) was actually better in that regard than the Copernican system (early heliocentric). Tweaks to either system (by adding epicycles, for instance) could bring them more or less into agreement with observations. This may have led you to believe that the two models (or at least tweaked versions of them) are mathematically equivalent.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, the pre-telescopic observations (apart from those of the sun and the moon) were purely positional, concerned only with the relative locations and motions of the objects as seen from earth. During the centuries since the invention of the telescope, however, we’ve acquired a mass of nonpositional observations (starting with Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus) plus positional observations from locations other than Earth. We’ve also gotten better at measuring positions precisely and accounting for things like parallax. When you consider both the pre-telescopic observations AND the later ones, the heliocentric model blows the geocentric model out of the water. The predictions are utterly different, and so the models cannot be mathematically equivalent.
Modern spaceflight is just the icing on the cake. If the Apollo missions had been planned using the geocentric model, the astronauts would never have made it home.
I’m not getting your logic. Living bodies and dead bodies do behave differently. Autopoiesis, self-organization, these are formative principles of every earthly living system that has ever existed. And every living system contains life and death within itself. Dead matter is a product of living systems.
I do wonder how the laws of physics predict that I will go to my fridge with the intention of getting a drink? Knowing that coke isn’t the most nutritious and healthy drink, I might have an inner struggle of will and overcome the desire to make that journey. How is that explainable by physics?
I know my soul through personal experience and not by speculating on what might belong within the concept of ‘physical’.
I think Sri Aurobindo was a very wise person.
Here he talks about matter coming into existence out of energy:
That passage is taken from writings found at this site.
Many people who were happy to be labelled as materialists began to realize that this was too limited a term, because it didn’t really cover energy. So the term ‘physicalist’ became popular because it included matter and energy.
If researchers demonstrate to the scientific community that there is a subtle life-field, would it be classed as ‘physical’?
Your evidence rests on the assumption that non-life is primal to life, and that living substance is not integral to, but a product of dead matter, your conclusions are perfectly reasonable and understandable from this position.
My evidence rests on the assumption that life is primal to non-life, and that dead matter is integral to living substance.
My experience tells me that I have a soul.
I am a complete being who thinks. That is I make use of my body, soul and spirit in forming my thoughts. To say that my brain thinks is equivalent to saying that my legs walk to the fridge when I go there to get a drink. It is much more accurate, complete and true to reality to say that I walk by means of my normal functioning legs, and that I think by means of my normal functioning brain.
If I break up a large rock I will get multiple rocks with the same essential properties of the original. Living beings are not like that. Separate me and my brain and the properties of these two lumps of matter will not have the same essential properties of my original being. I would not attribute the power of thought to either of them.
How would you apply the same reasoning to the theory of evolution?
Can you?
Will you?
BTW: you don’t need the “official definition of the THEORY of evolution”, do you?
I admire your optimism, but I strongly doubt that. Look at what Charlie marshals in support:
Science is capricious and unreliable. Poetry is eternal truth. 🙂
The soul will survive.
ETA: Almost forgot: Best wishes!
I take full responsibility for my clumsy way of putting things.
So yes, space and time belong together as one (by this I don’t mean the modern conception of space/time which merely treats time as if it were an extra dimension of space) Regarding external perception, both space and time are always involved. In reality there are unified processes which can be thought of in terms of space and in terms of time for analytical purposes. But in this world there is truly no such separation between the two.
Each external perceptual event can be thought of as a single experience. By this process we cannot experience the complete life of, say, a plant from seed to death. But we can get to know the life of a plant by carrying out thorough studies of every stage of its life. I can then recall these events and hold them in my mind and understand the complete process. This is what I mean by higher perception. The timeframe involved is not available to my my external senses, but I can ‘see’ it in my mind using recollection. This is an inner perception, but what I perceive is more true to the life of the plant than anything my outer senses tell me. I make a habit of studying the plant out there. I organize these perceptions in my mind so that I obtain an understanding of the living plant. Through this process I draw much closer to the plant.
The following are not his actual words but Steiner might put it thus:
“I perceive from two directions, outer sense perception and inner intuitive perception. I have these experiences in my soul life. The immediate sensations are impressed on the astral ‘body’, and for them to be available for recall from memory, they have to be impressed on the etheric ‘body’. Recalling them is a soul experience. I also receive intuitive impressions into my soul which can be impressed on the etheric body via the astral body in the same way. (Putting it more objectively ‘I’ could be replaced by ‘the ego’.)
“The etheric streams are the formative forces which focus the physical substances into the form of my body. I am not composed of physical substances alone. I consist of the physical, the etheric, the astral and the ego all combining and influencing each other in the processes that are my existence.”
I am a physical body made up of streams of flowing matter entering and leaving me, a dynamic form which is more permanent than this matter, a sentient being which has experiences, and a self-conscious rational being which has conscious memories and intentions for the future.
I agree.
It’s common practice to use the same word for both. Seeing in the sense of apprehending visually involves much more than having the external image imprinted on my retinas and converted into nerve impulses. I focus on specific areas, ignore others, bring concepts into relation with the image experienced.
In understanding I can bring mental images into my ‘minds eye’ In ‘seeing’ mental images, I believe my visual cortex, which I use in normal vision, plays a role.
‘Plain old understanding’ is a very complicated affair. My mind may not be out in the world in a physical sense, but it is capable of being expanded to become one with whatever is under study.
I appreciate that most of what I have said is nigh on impossible to believe for a person who believes that the physical is at the core of all of reality.