Did I lose my mind to science?

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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.”

464 thoughts on “Did I lose my mind to science?”

  1. Corneel,

    Happy New Year!

    I admire your optimism, but I strongly doubt that.

    You’re right, of course. There’s no way Charlie is going to give up his belief in the soul. He’ll always fall back on his supposed “direct experience” as a justification for continuing to believe. But he’s definitely been having to pare down his concept of the soul, and that’s progress.

    We’ll have to keep him from doing a “reset” and pretending that his concessions never happened. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to do a better job of “keeping the receipts” so that it’s easier to find old comments and quote his words back to him. I’m also going to press him harder to acknowledge explicitly when he changes his position.

    Science is capricious and unreliable. Poetry is eternal truth. 🙂

    That he’s having to trot this stuff out is evidence that he can’t defend the soul on rational or scientific grounds. If he were truly content with relying on “direct experience” or the Word of Steiner, he wouldn’t be here at TSZ defending his views. He wants to show that his (and Steiner’s) views are intellectually respectable, and his failure to do so must gnaw at him. I’m hoping the cognitive dissonance will lead him in the right direction.

    We’ll see.

  2. Happy New Year, Charlie!

    More later, but for now I want to address this “higher form of seeing” business.

    keiths:

    Why call it ‘a higher form of seeing’ when you keep parenthetically pointing out that it’s really just ‘understanding’? Sure, ‘a higher form of seeing’ sounds cooler, but it’s inaccurate, and it’s an example of how you confuse yourself by using anthroposophical terminology. ‘Understanding’ and ‘seeing’ are separate phenomena. Don’t confuse yourself by trying to use the same word for both.

    CharlieM:

    It’s common practice to use the same word for both.

    I addressed that in an earlier comment. Yes, we use the word “see” metaphorically all the time, as when I say “I see your dilemma”. That’s perfectly fine when it’s obvious that the use is metaphorical. No one will get confused and think I’m talking about seeing a dilemma with my eyes.

    The problem is that you used the phrase “a higher form of seeing” in the context of a discussion of visual illusions, and you referred to it as a form of “direct perception” that did not involve the eyes. Any reasonable person would infer that you were talking about a literal form of perception, not a metaphorical one.

    In subsequent comments, you indicated that this “higher form of seeing” was really just “understanding”. My question is, why use the phrase “a higher form of seeing” when you really just mean “understanding”, particularly in a context where “seeing” is ambiguous?

    Maybe Steiner uses the phrase, and you’re aping the Master. Maybe you just think that “a higher form of seeing” sounds more exciting than “understanding”. But its use is unnecessary, and it misleads your readers. I also think it confuses you.

    keiths:

    Your ‘higher form of seeing’ isn’t seeing. It’s not ‘perception in time’, either. It’s just plain old understanding.

    CharlieM:

    ‘Plain old understanding’ is a very complicated affair.

    I’m not trying to minimize the complexity of understanding. I’m just saying that the phrase “a higher form of seeing” is grandiose and misleading when all you’re really referring to is garden-variety understanding of the kind all of us use in our everyday life. Using “perception in time” to mean “understanding” is also unnecessary and misleading, for much the same reason.

  3. Haha. Guess who:

    Take for example that whole game of thought, if I may call it so, the Kinetic Theory of Gases, of of Heat itself, — the molecules impinging on each other and on the walls of the containing vessel. Take all this brutal play of mutual impact and recoil which is supposed to represent the thermal condition of gas. Instead of this phenomena will become clear and penetrable the moment we perceive that within warmth itself there are two conditions. akin to the conditions that prevail in ponderable matter; the other must be thought of as akin to the ether. Warmth is in this respect different from Air or Light. For light, if we are calculating truly we must use the negative sign throughout. Whatever in our formulae is to represent the effects of light, must bear a negative sign. For air or gas the sign must be positive. For warmth on the other hand, the positive and negative will have to alternate. What we are wont to distinguish as conducted heat, radiant heat and so on will only then become clear and transparent.

    What a fraud that guy was.

  4. CharlieM:

    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…

    Your claim is that life depends on an ‘etheric component’, the removal of which leaves behind only ‘dead matter’. I’m explaining why this isn’t true and why your own position is inadvertently self-contradictory.

    You’ve agreed with me that particles always follow the laws of physics. That means that what a particle does over time is determined by what it’s doing now and what its physical environment is. This remains true when you combine particles to form larger configurations such as a human body. If each particle behaves according to the laws of physics, the behavior of the body as a whole is determined by the laws of physics.

    Consider a living human body in a specific state, with all of its matter and energy arranged in a particular configuration. Its behavior over time is determined by the laws of physics. Let’s call the current state S1. S1, along with the laws of physics, determines what the state will be an instant from now. Let’s call that S2. (I’m neglecting the environment here for simplicity’s sake, but including it does not change the logic of the argument. I can explain if needed.) S2, along with the laws of physics, determines what S3 will be, and so on. The future behavior of the body is determined.

    As I sit here, my living body is progressing through such a series of states. Watch it for 30 seconds, and you will see it typing away at the keyboard. That is all determined by the laws of physics. Now rewind the clock by 30 seconds and remove my etheric component. According to you, my body will now be dead. We know that dead bodies don’t type away at keyboards, so when you set the clock in motion again, my body won’t continue typing. It will slump over the keyboard, lifeless. The removal of my etheric component has changed the behavior of my body over the subsequent 30 second period.

    But wait — before you removed my etheric component, the laws of physics dictated that I would be typing during that 30 second period. You’ve agreed that the laws of physics are always followed, with no exceptions. That means that even after you’ve rewound the clock and removed my etheric component, my body is still going to be typing during that 30-second period. My heart will be beating and my lungs will be working. I will still be alive despite the removal of my etheric component.

    Therefore, the etheric component is not needed to keep me alive. The laws of physics do that just fine on their own.

  5. CharlieM:

    I do wonder how the laws of physics predict that I will go to my fridge with the intention of getting a drink?

    The same way they predict that I’ll continue typing over the next 30 seconds, as described in the previous comment. The same way they predict that my kitchen clock will keep telling the time, that my truck won’t keep moving after it runs out of gas, that airplane wings will generate lift, and that a hole in the bottom of my honey bottle will cause a sticky mess. All of those things happen simply because the particles involved are following the laws of physics. Nothing extra is needed.

    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?

    That inner struggle of will against temptation is happening in your brain, and the particles in your brain are all following the laws of physics. If the particles were arranged differently, you might easily overcome the temptation with no struggle at all. Put them in another configuration and you might succumb to the temptation and grab a Coke. In yet another configuration you might not even like the taste of Coke, so there would be no temptation at all. In each of these cases, the particles in your brain are simply following the laws of physics, as particles everywhere do. They don’t care whether they’re part of your brain.

    The particles in an electric can opener aren’t trying to open cans, and they don’t know or care that they’re part of a can opener. They just blindly follow the laws of physics. Like the particles, the laws of physics also aren’t geared toward opening cans. The laws don’t have a goal; they just are. Arrange particles in one way and you get a can opener. Arrange them in a different way and you get a machine that seals lids onto cans. The particles and the laws of physics don’t care. They just do their thing.

    This is why I keep stressing that the properties of a system need not be the same as the properties of its components. The particles in your brain neither like nor dislike Coke, and they don’t struggle with temptation. Those are properties of your brain, not of the particles that make up your brain. As with the particles, so with the laws of physics. The laws of physics don’t struggle with temptation and they neither like nor dislike Coke. They just are. It’s your brain, whose particles are blindly following the laws of physics, that likes the taste of Coke and struggles with the temptation to drink one.* The system, not its components, has those properties.

    * And no, there is no contradiction between saying that your brain likes Coke and that you like Coke.

  6. CharlieM:

    I know my soul through personal experience…

    See this comment.

    If researchers demonstrate to the scientific community that there is a subtle life-field, would it be classed as ‘physical’?

    If its effects were physically detectable (by competent experimentalists), then I suppose it would be classified as physical. I myself would be inclined to classify it that way. But of course no such field has been detected, and its detection would not by itself bolster the case for an immaterial soul.

    You’ve been focusing a lot on what does and doesn’t qualify as physical, but that isn’t as significant as you seem to think it is. If the ‘subtle life-field’ were physically detectable, then it would be amenable to scientific investigation whether or not we classified it as physical. It’s the same with the soul.

    You’ve repeatedly run into the interaction problem — the problem of explaining how the soul, which you’ve said is nonphysical, interacts with the body, which is physical. You’ve been suggesting that maybe some of the stuff Steiner talks about could be classified as physical, and I suppose that’s why you’ve been raising questions about what the criteria are. I suspect you’re hoping that if these various Steinerian things are really physical, then the interaction problem goes away for them. Alas, not so. The label you slap on a hypothetical entity doesn’t change the criteria for establishing its existence. Even if we go whole hog and classify the soul itself as physical, you still face the burden of explaining how it interacts with other physical entities and providing evidence that it actually does so. We know how various forms of matter and energy interact, and those are physical; but merely labeling the soul (or anything else that isn’t matter or energy) as physical doesn’t suddenly mean that it can interact with matter and energy. Labels are convenient, but they don’t alter the nature of the thing being labeled.

    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 belief that living organisms are assemblies of what you call “dead matter” is not an assumption, it’s a conclusion.

    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.

    See this comment.

    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.

    If all you are saying is that we consist of both brain and rest-of-body (“these two lumps of matter”), and that neither of those things shares all of the properties of the combination, then of course I agree. I think you’re trying to say more than that, however.

    I would not attribute the power of thought to either of them.

    What specifically does thought involve that you think the brain is incapable of doing?

  7. keiths:
    “CharlieM: It is wrong to assume that just because brain activity is coincident with thinking we can claim that thinking is caused by the brain.

    KN: It’s not an assumption. It’s a warranted conclusion from the past two hundred years of scientific psychology and neurophysiology.

    CharlieM: The geocentric view of the universe was a warranted conclusion based on thousands of years of astronomical observations.”

    keiths: Therefore we should ignore the evidence and believe whatever we want, because scientific theories are sometimes overturned? Um, no.

    No, indeed! What the Copernican revolution tells us is that there wasn’t just a gradual shift in human understanding of the heavens, there was a 180 degree shift. They went from believing the sun revolved around the earth to believing the opposite. Observation alone shows me the sun moving over the sky, and then, by the use of thinking, researchers gained an understanding (brought concepts to bear) of a solar system in which the earth orbits the sun.

    It’s all relative. From our point of view, the sun moves round us, but by ignoring earthbound human observation, the opposite could be, and was, proposed.

    It’s a similar situation with monism. Materialists do not have a monopoly on monism. There is such a thing as monistic idealism in which matter is a product of mind.

    CharlieM: Like the Necker cube, there are usually two ways of looking at the same thing, with very little difference to confirm either.

    keiths: Certainly not in this case. The evidence fits with physicalism and clashes with dualism. The evidence fits with germ theory and clashes with miasma theory. The evidence fits with modern thermodynamics and clashes with caloric theory. The rational thing is to reject dualism, miasma theory, and caloric theory and stick with the theories that actually work.

    The evidence shows that the soul doesn’t exist. You don’t like what the evidence is telling you, so you are fighting against it. That’s your right, of course, but don’t kid yourself. What you are doing is just as irrational as what the Scientologists, the flat-earthers, and the 2020 election deniers are doing.

    You are trapped in the prison of belief. Don’t throw away the key. It’s not too late to unlock the cell and escape.

    My experience tells me that the soul exists. But I don’t hold a dualist position. I see unities in which polarities are an enduring feature. I am a thinking being, a sentient being, a living being and a physical being. I was not a purely physical being at conception, I was a living being. Life is primal to my existence. Try as they might to come up with an adequate account how dead physical substance could give rise to life, physicalists have not arrived at any realistic solutions.

    Copernicus relegated the human observer from a position of prominence to playing an insignificant role in reality. This was further strengthened by Darwinism through which we have now become part of a tiny twig on the enormous tree of life.

    But like the insignificant birth of a Jewish boy in a lowly backwater of the Roman empire, this was foreordained. If we had always felt to be part of the higher realms and experienced the love of higher beings how easy would it have been to return the love and be grateful? But from the seemingly unprivileged position we find ourselves in among this pointless, swirling, burst of mindless matter, any love we feel for a higher reality will be freely given love without obligation. If we do believe in and love God, we cannot say that we have been coerced.

  8. Speaking of memory in relation to the brain. Researchers who have tried to correlate memory with brain ‘stuff’ have had very little success.

    Karl S. Lashley was a pioneer in this research. He could not find specific areas of the brain where memories could be stored.

    Here for Wikipedia:

    An engram is a unit of cognitive information imprinted in a physical substance, theorized to be the means by which memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other biological tissue, in response to external stimuli.

    Demonstrating the existence of, and the exact mechanism and location of, neurologically defined engrams has been a focus of persistent research for many decades.

    The latest research has concluded that fields rather than neurons are a better area to investigate. And even these are not static in relation to areas of the brain as the phenomenon of representational drift demonstrates.

    Neurons are fickle: Electric fields are more reliable for information – March 11, 2022
    Picower Institute at MIT
    Summary: A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome ‘representational drift,’ or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons.

    It is a step beyond the restrictions of the materialistic model but they still don’t understand how memories are actually stored in these fields.

  9. Today’s entertaining Steiner quote:

    Modern physicists have conjured and juggled about with electricity in a strange way, without the least suspicion. They imagine the atom as something electric, and through the general state of consciousness of the present time, they forget that whenever they think of an atom as an electric entity, they must ascribe a moral impulse to this atom, indeed, to every atom. At the same time, they must raise it to the rank of a moral entity. …But I am not speaking correctly … for, in reality, when we transform an atom into an electron, we do not transform it into a moral, but into an IMMORAL entity! Electricity contains, to be sure, moral impulses, impulses of Nature, but these impulses are IMMORAL; they are instincts of evil, which must be overcome by the higher world.

  10. Charlie,

    In the Picower study they are talking about working memory, not long-term memory, so this is unrelated to the work of Lashley, who was trying to understand how long-term memories are stored.

    Second, you appear to be taking some comfort from the hypothesis that electric fields might help to stabilize the representation of information in working memory, because you see that as evidence that science is moving “beyond the restrictions of the materialistic model”. It doesn’t show that. The “materialistic model” is just the physicalist model — remember what I’ve been telling you about the synonymy between “immaterial soul” and “nonphysical soul” — and the physicalist model fully incorporates electric fields (and other fields). Fields are not a stepping stone toward Steineresque woo.

    Third, it’s well established that memory is a function of the brain; hence the tragedy of Alzheimer’s patients who are unable to recognize their own children or remember their names. Think about what that is telling you: the soul, if it exists at all, can’t remember. It needs the brain to do the remembering for it.

    See my comment about the useless soul.

    Most people (including Steiner, as far as I can tell, and presumably you) believe that the soul lives on after death with memories intact. The evidence belies that.

  11. CharlieM:

    What the Copernican revolution tells us is that there wasn’t just a gradual shift in human understanding of the heavens, there was a 180 degree shift.

    You are trying to draw an analogy between the geocentric-to-heliocentric shift on the one hand and a hoped-for physicalist-to-dualist (or wooalist) shift on the other. The analogy doesn’t work, for reasons I’ve already given but will restate.

    Before the geo-to-helio shift, the evidence didn’t favor one over the other. The shift to the helio model didn’t occur because the earlier evidence had been overthrown or invalidated; it occurred because new evidence tipped the balance toward heliocentrism.

    The situation with physicalism vs dualism/wooalism/soulism is completely different. The current evidence overwhelmingly favors physicalism and shows that the soul does not exist. Only one model is viable. You hope for another “180-degree shift”, but that would require that the existing evidence be invalidated. Do you really think someone is going to come along and say “You know what we’ve been saying about how Alzheimer’s patients sometimes forget their own children? Never mind. That doesn’t happen. Their memories are unaffected”? The evidence is not going to be overthrown, so your hope for a dramatic shift away from physicalism and back toward dualism/wooalism/soulism is unrealistic.

  12. keiths:
    CharlieM: The geocentric view of the universe was a warranted conclusion based on thousands of years of astronomical observations.

    Both geocentrism AND heliocentrism fit those early observations. The preference for geocentrism was motivated by philosophical and religious considerations, not scientific ones. It was later observations (such as Galileo’s telescopic observations of the phases of Venus) that caused us to abandon geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism.

    (I once had an interesting discussion with Neil Rickert on the subject of geocentrism vs heliocentrism. He argued that they are scientifically equivalent and that one can be converted to the other simply by changing the coordinate system. That’s a mistake, of course. Heliocentrism fits the evidence and geocentrism doesn’t, and that remains true even if you change from a heliocentric coordinate system to a geocentric one. Astronomers are fully justified in rejecting geocentrism on scientific grounds.)

    My point is that the historic geocentrism vs heliocentrism debate isn’t analogous to the current physicalism vs dualism debate. Geocentrism and heliocentrism were both compatible with observation for thousands of years, and they were therefore both viable scientifically. It was only later that observations “broke the tie” and favored heliocentrism. Physicalism and dualism are not both compatible with our observations, and they are not both viable scientifically. Physicalism fits the evidence and dualism does not, so the position of the dualist is not at all analogous to the position of the heliocentrist during geocentrist times.

    Physicalism works as a theory and dualism* does not. There is no scientific justification for being a dualist.

    * In a nod to the cognoscenti, I should note that I am referring here to substance dualism, not property dualism.

    The move from geocentrism to heliocentrism is consistent with the move in which participatory consciousness is being lost and an onlooker consciousness is taking its place as Barfield would frame it. The geocentrism view looked at the universe in relation to the focal point of human consciousness. Geocentrism is a narrative of the inner journey of human soul through the spheres. Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ is a beautiful poetic account of how a person might experience this journey.

    Heliocentrism superceded geocentrism in line with humans taking up a more materialistic position. The universe could now be studied as a mechanism in which human consciousness was disregarded as a recent creation of Darwinian evolution. The solid earth along with the other planets revolved round a giant ball of gas and we were insignificant onlookers watching this mindlessly. moving matter. And the more sophisticated our probing instruments have become the more insignificant we have become.

    It would be more accurate to say that the solar system revolves around a common centre as it spirals its way round the galaxy.

    But what can we say about this current materialistic outlook? James Tartaglia, who, by his own account, is an atheist, has this to say:

    So those are the kind of, essentially if you are talking about metaphysics, irrational reasons that I think it has come to be dominant basically forgetting what philosophy is, and forgetting, and thinking it’s the same thing as science and technology.

    If you actually look at what a materialist has to say in order to persuade other philosophers of their view, well right from the beginning of the materialist renaissance in the 1950s, it focused on conscious experience because there’s something very odd about saying that an experience or pain or a thought can be something physical. How can it have a size and a shape? It doesn’t seem to make sense. An experience is there just for me whereas an object is out there in the world. And the way the materialist tried to deal with this issue is, well I mean any materialist must ultimately identify experiences, no matter how much technical apparatus they put around it, if everything is physical, then ultimately experiences and thoughts must be physical as well. So, there must be some kind of identity. And they went straight for that particular way of looking at it to start with. So how can there be an identity between two things that seem to have different properties? Well, what they say is it’s really just two interpretations. So it’s like you can interpret something as a statue or a lump of clay. You’re interpreting it as a brain state or as an experience. Well there’s two problems with that; reasons it won’t work. One the idea of interpreting presupposes consciousness. A rock or a chair doesn’t interpret anything. So you can’t lean on the notion of consciousness to explain how consciousness can be something physical. Even if you think you can get around that, okay, the bigger problem is one of those interpretations must be wrong, it must be incorrect, because the correct interpretation is as a brain state. If I interpret that as both a screen and a cat, which seem very different, then the cat which I’m imagining doesn’t really exist. So this lead many philosophers to deny the existence of experience or say that it’s a kind of illusion. The evidence is illusory in some sense. But the problem with that is if experience is illusory in some way, we shouldn’t trust it. It is a misconception of physical reality, then our whole world view is built on this misconception, the whole world of science. So there’s no reason to believe materialism in the first place.

    I don’t believe in the duality of spirit and matter. That’s because I believe matter is a condensed form of spirit. I don’t believe in a physical world of subjective appearances sitting over an unreachable, objective world of ‘things in themselves’. I believe Owen Barfield is pointing in the right direction with his book, ;Saving the Appearances’. This is about just that, saving the appearances. The world we perceive is not an illusion, but it is not a complete revelation of reality. Thinking gives us access to that which completes the reality. These are the concepts which are not my inventions, but belong to the entities or processes which I perceive. I first apprehend things as separate, but this is of my own making and I am equipped with the attributes which allow me to rectify this and return things to a unified reality.

  13. keiths:
    CharlieM, to DNA_Jock:

    You ask me to consider things, to imagine, to think things through; in other words you are asking me to think. In doing so I am doing something which is a direct experience. A young child will be able to think even if they have no concept of the brain in their head.

    keiths: You bring this up again and again, but you never explain why it constitutes evidence against physicalism. I’ve asked you multiple times, and I’ve even provided a template for your answer:

    Below is an outline of your presumed argument. Step 1 is the premise, and step N is the conclusion. What are steps 2 through N-1?

    1. Thinking is required in order to come to conclusions.

    N. Therefore, thinking cannot be a physical process.

    What goes in the middle?

    Please answer.

    Thinking cannot be weighed, measured or numbered. And from the talk by James Tartaglia, the conscious experience of thinking is not of the same kind and does not have the same properties as physical substance so there is an identity problem. Thinking is a process, and brain activity is a process, but to say that they are the same thing is like saying that thunder and lightning are the same thing, which they obviously are not.

    Thinking is mental activity and brain activity is physical activity.

  14. keiths:
    CharlieM: I am not claiming that the brain has no involvement in thinking.

    keiths: Well, that’s progress, I guess. In light of the Alzheimer’s example, do you acknowledge that telling the time from a clock is something that the soul (assuming it exists) cannot do on its own?

    It’s progress in that you have a clearer understanding of my position.

    Of course I acknowledge this. To tell the time in this way requires the person to have visual awareness of the clock, and this involves the brain.

  15. CharlieM, quoting James Tartaglia:

    If you actually look at what a materialist has to say in order to persuade other philosophers of their view, well right from the beginning of the materialist renaissance in the 1950s, it focused on conscious experience because there’s something very odd about saying that an experience or pain or a thought can be something physical. How can it have a size and a shape?

    Digestion doesn’t have a size or a shape. Neither does iridescence. Therefore these are not physical processes. Who knew?

    What is the size of transportation? What is the shape of heat? More nonphysical stuff. The world suddenly looks very spooky, doesn’t it?

    What is the shape of my washer’s spin cycle? Christ, even my laundry appliances are haunted by this nonphysical stuff.

    You’re interpreting it as a brain state or as an experience. Well there’s two problems with that; reasons it won’t work. One the idea of interpreting presupposes consciousness. A rock or a chair doesn’t interpret anything. So you can’t lean on the notion of consciousness to explain how consciousness can be something physical.

    The materialist isn’t saying that you’re somehow off to the side, observing your brain state, and saying to yourself “I can interpret this as a brain state, or I can interpret it as an experience.” Your brain state is part of you. You aren’t observing it (although you can, with the right technology).

    So this lead many philosophers to deny the existence of experience or say that it’s a kind of illusion. The evidence is illusory in some sense. But the problem with that is if experience is illusory in some way, we shouldn’t trust it. It is a misconception of physical reality, then our whole world view is built on this misconception, the whole world of science. So there’s no reason to believe materialism in the first place.

    Illusionists deny the reality of subjective awareness, but they do not deny that something very real is happening when I, for instance, look at my screen and read a paragraph. The information is really there, and I’m really processing it. The illusionists only deny my interpretation of it as a subjective experience. Tartaglia is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

  16. Charlie,

    Responding to every comment is a nice idea in theory, but in practice it’s causing you to fall hopelessly behind. You’re responding to comments that are more than a week old, while I’m responding to yours within a day or two, usually less. It’s like a conversation between a news anchor and a reporter where the satellite delay isn’t a couple of seconds, it’s an entire week.

    When you find yourself falling behind, could you maybe skip responding to a few comments so that you can catch up? Or shorten your replies?

    If you do insist on responding to week-old comments, could you at least read ahead so that your responses take into account what I (and others) have said in the meantime? It’s frustrating when you ask a question on Friday that I’ve already answered in great detail on Tuesday, in a comment you haven’t gotten around to reading yet.

  17. keiths:

    In light of the Alzheimer’s example, do you acknowledge that telling the time from a clock is something that the soul (assuming it exists) cannot do on its own?

    CharlieM:

    Of course I acknowledge this. To tell the time in this way requires the person to have visual awareness of the clock, and this involves the brain.

    OK, so you are conceding that souls on their own 1) cannot tell time from a clock, and 2) cannot see (in the normal sense of the word). They rely upon the brain to provide visual awareness. So after death, with no brain at their disposal, souls are blind to anything in the physical world. Correct?

    I notice you have avoided addressing the rest of the time-telling process — the cognitive part. If the soul knows that the little hand points to the two and the big hand points to the 8, can the soul figure out that it is 2:40?

    The evidence says no, because brain damage due to Alzheimer’s can rob people of this ability. If the soul were responsible, this ability would be unaffected by the disease.

    So we have a soul that is not only blind, it is also profoundly disabled mentally. It is stumped by a simple cognitive task that we learn to do as children.

    By extension, the soul also cannot hear on its own. In fact, none of the five senses are available to it, since all of them are mediated by the brain. After death, the soul might as well be in a sensory deprivation tank.

    And let’s not forget language. We know that the production and understanding of language can be disrupted by damage to the brain, which means that the soul on its own has no language capabilities.

    And memory. Brain damage can disrupt the storage and retrieval of memories, so the soul can’t remember.

    On and on it goes, leading to the question: Is there anything the soul actually can do?

  18. CharlieM:

    Thinking is mental activity and brain activity is physical activity.

    You’ve also told us that the brain is the organ of thought, so let’s tie it all together. Thinking is carried out by the organ of thought, which is the brain, and brain activity is physical activity. Therefore thinking is physical activity.

    You’re making excellent progress, Charlie!

    We’ve established that the soul on its own is blind and deaf, can’t touch, taste, or smell, can’t remember anything, and can’t even think. Do you see where this is heading?

  19. keiths: There’s a phenomenon I think of as “the incredible shrinking soul”, in which dualists like Charlie are forced by the evidence to acknowledge that some of the activities they previously attributed to the soul are in fact carried out by the brain. This happens again and again, so that the role of the soul keeps shrinking. At some point you have to ask: “What exactly does the soul do, if all these things are carried out by the brain?”

    So I’m a dualist. One body, one soul, one spirit equals three aspects. A physical body, an etheric ‘body’, an astral ‘body’, and ego, the fourfold perspective. Maybe you can put me in the mono-dual-tri-quad-ist box. 🙂

    keiths: It’s even more awkward for the folks who believe that the soul can exist apart from the body or after the body has died. As I just noted, the Alzheimer’s evidence suggests that the soul, if it exists, cannot read the time from a clock face. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

    What’s the point of a profoundly debilitated soul that can’t perform basic cognitive tasks on its own?

    I am wondering what cognitive tasks a brain could perform on its own. Can anyone help? I’m sure somebody must have an idea, I can feel it in my soul” 🙂

  20. Charlie,

    You can try to joke and deflect your way out of this, but the question isn’t going away.

    What good is a soul that is blind and deaf, can’t touch, taste, or smell, can’t remember anything, and can’t even think? If the soul can’t do any of these things, what can it do?

    Please answer directly.

  21. CharlieM: Not sure what you are finding fault with. I would say if white has a luminance value of 100%, pure yellow is the closest colour to white and pure blue is closest to black.

    1) You said “equivalent to”, not “closest to”. “Equivalent to” is not equivalent to “closest to”. It is not even close to it.
    2) You suggested that the optical illusion was due to the fact that we perceive “warm” (red, yellow) spectral colours as advancing and that artists therefore use these properties in their paintings. If you are going to suggest that white evokes the same feelings as red and yellow, then I sincerely hope you’ll never take up painting.
    3) All of this is utterly irrelevant, because your belief that there is a bright yellow edge (red, white, whatever …) colour advancing across the Mario figures is false. ALL colours cycle across the figure and in the black-and-white version BOTH black and white cycle; There is no privileged colour in the illusion. That is you seeing things that are not there.

    CharlieM: Can you explain where you think the fault lies in my understanding of the Mario illusion?

    To a nice fella like you? Sure, although if you’d have bothered to read the post I linked to you would have known already: The perception of motion in that illusion is independent of phase. That is: It doesn’t matter one iota what colours are cycling across the figures. It takes only a glance at the “time slice” figures in that blog post to see that your original claim that there is “displacement (movement) of [the] bright yellow” across the figures is utter nonsense.

    NOW: FORGET ABOUT COLOUR THEORY!!! IT IS NOT IMPORTANT!

    The thing I want you to focus on is that you convinced yourself that you could see a bright yellow edge colour moving from one side to the other when in fact no such thing was occurring (well, no more then for any other colour). Also, I want you to consider how you made the same mistake for white, when in fact black and white were getting equal representation through time. This is classical reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. Finally, note how you failed to realise your mistake the first time it was pointed out and just went on to concoct a completely new, equally mistaken, story. This you are doing all the time!

    You are forever embellishing your arguments but never allow for the possibility that they were wrong to begin with. This prevents you from getting anything useful from all of the feedback you are receiving here.

  22. keiths to CharlieM: When you find yourself falling behind, could you maybe skip responding to a few comments so that you can catch up? Or shorten your replies?

    If you believe some of your comments can be safely skipped anyway, maybe from your end you could slow down somewhat so as to make it easier for Charlie to catch up 😉

  23. keiths:
    CharlieM: I cannot say if what I describe is incompatible with physicalism because I’m not exactly sure what physicalism entails.

    keiths: In other words, you can’t justify your intuition about urges being evidence against physicalism. Keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to make an argument along those lines.

    I’m not arguing against physicalism. Given your prior beliefs it’s a perfectly understandable position to take. What I don’t go along with is the belief that my brain tells me how to think and act. I use my brain. When you refer to yourself as ‘I’, surely you are speaking about more than the brain?

    CharlieM: Thoughts may be correlated with brain processes, but is this enough to claim that brain processes cause thinking?

    keiths: As I keep explaining, the physicalist view is based on far more than the mere correlation between brain activity and thinking.

    For example, we know that the brain is responsible for time-telling not just because the brain is active while we are telling time, but because physical damage to the brain can disrupt this ability

    Physical damage to my car battery can disrupt my ability to drive into town so my car battery is responsible for my drive into town!? I hold myself responsible for driving my car around.

    Do you believe that the brain has sole responsibility for thinking? If you are aware that you are a thinking being, is this just your brain deluding itself? After all it’s only the brain that can have conscious thoughts, is it not? Why doesn’t it think, “I am a thinking brain inside a body”?

    The brain is just one part of a unified whole. ‘I AM’.

  24. A quick comment. There is no such thing as a soul on its own just as there is no such thing as a brain on its own.

    (Thinking aloud:- I might make quick comments a feature of my participation. I can always return to the comments and give a more complete answer at a later time.)

  25. keiths:
    CharlieM, to Corneel: Can you explain where you think the fault lies in my understanding of the Mario illusion?

    keiths: Like Corneel, I have no desire to get into an extended discussion of Goethe’s color “theory”, but I will point out one thing. You argued that the illusion had something to do with Goethe’s claim regarding colors:

    CharlieM: According to Goethe we see the warm yellow/red spectral colours as advancing, and the violet/blue cold spectral colours as receding.

    keiths: That cannot be an explanation of the illusion, because we don’t see the Marios (or parts of the Marios) as advancing toward us or receding from us. They “move” laterally.

    I wasn’t using it to explain the illusion. I was using it to bring to light Goethe’s findings. He observed that even static colours on a surface can give the impression of movement. One house we moved into had wallpaper that we found very hard to live with because the illusion of movement brought on by the pattern was so unsettling. It was one of the first things to go.

    The Mario illusion is caused by the constantly shifting positions of the light and dark edges. This contrast is important whether it is between yellow and blue or white and black.

  26. Corneel,

    Just read keiths’ and your comments. Hopefully my addition of short preliminary replies to the most recent posts will help a bit.

  27. There has been some research done on paradoxical lucidity, (often referred to as terminal lucidity), in dementia sufferers. Hopefully this research will continue.

    Friends of mine say they have witnessed this when a loved one, suffering from a particularly nasty form of dementia, was nearing death, and I have no reason to doubt their account.

    What is your explanation for this, keiths?

  28. CharlieM to keiths: CharlieM: According to Goethe we see the warm yellow/red spectral colours as advancing, and the violet/blue cold spectral colours as receding.

    keiths: That cannot be an explanation of the illusion, because we don’t see the Marios (or parts of the Marios) as advancing toward us or receding from us. They “move” laterally.

    Charlie: I wasn’t using it to explain the illusion.

    Yes, you were.

    Given that you are now denying that you were trying to explain the optical illusion, I gather that you have accepted that your “advancing colour” explanation is bogus. That’s good, but actually I do not really care about that.

    What really bugs me is that you have started your usual backpedaling instead of “stimulating your thinking” and using some introspection to examine what led you to make these outrageous claims.

  29. keiths: …the Woollacott quote he provides describes the mainstream view, not the eliminativist one…

    …I can’t find anything in the entire article to suggest that he (Peters) understands the difference or recognizes that the mainstream view isn’t eliminativist. Can you?

    I’m not sure why the Woollacott quote can’t be compatible with the eliminativist position. Can you explain it to me? With all the nuances of philosophical positions and who believes what I have trouble keeping up with all this.

    Peters writes:

    “According to the common neuroscientific view, the mind is the creation of the brain,” writes University of Oregon neuroscientist Marjorie Hines Woollacott. “In other words, material processes in the cerebral cortex—somehow!—generate thoughts and feelings”

    Woollacott doesn’t mention any attributes of this ‘created mind’.

  30. Corneel, to CharlieM:

    1) You said “equivalent to”, not “closest to”. “Equivalent to” is not equivalent to “closest to”. It is not even close to it.

    You made me read that twice. 🙂

    If you believe some of your comments can be safely skipped anyway, maybe from your end you could slow down somewhat so as to make it easier for Charlie to catch up 😉

    Haha. I actually thought about going away for a week to give him time to catch up, but then I figured he would just fall behind again after I came back.

    It seems like he’s taken our complaints to heart and is going to try harder to keep up. I’m hopeful.

  31. CharlieM, regarding paradoxical lucidity:

    What is your explanation for this, keiths?

    We all know from experience that the symptoms of physical illness can wax and wane. Dementia is a physical illness, so it isn’t surprising that its symptoms too can wax and wane. I certainly experienced that when interacting with my mom during the last years of her life. Nothing about that seems incompatible with physicalism.

    What is your explanation? If paradoxical lucidity is an indication that the soul is there and functioning correctly, why did the patient lose lucidity in the first place? Why does physical damage to the brain cause the soul to lose lucidity?

  32. CharlieM:

    I’m not sure why the Woollacott quote can’t be compatible with the eliminativist position. Can you explain it to me?

    Sure. Here’s the quote:

    According to the common neuroscientific view, the mind is the creation of the brain. In other words, material processes in the cerebral cortex—somehow!—generate thoughts and feelings.

    Saying that the mind is the creation of the brain doesn’t imply that the mind is an illusion, and saying that material processes generate thoughts and feelings doesn’t imply that they are illusions, either. I believe that minds, thoughts, and feelings are all real and that they are all produced by the brain. That is the common neuroscientific view.

  33. CharlieM:

    There is no such thing as a soul on its own just as there is no such thing as a brain on its own.

    Does that mean that you disagree with Steiner about our souls’ continued existence after death? If so (which I doubt), then congratulations. If not, is this a pedantic dodge of some sort? Perhaps along the lines of “the soul is always accompanied by the astral body” or some such nonsense?

    If it’s the latter, then knock it off. You know perfectly well that when I speak of the soul I am talking about any nonphysical entity or combination of entities that is distinct from the body. When I talk about what the soul can and cannot do “on its own”, I am talking about what it can and cannot do sans body.

  34. CharlieM:

    I’m not arguing against physicalism.

    Give me a frikkin’ break.

    Given your prior beliefs it’s a perfectly understandable position to take.

    You’d like to believe that your position and mine are both viable, given our differing “prior beliefs”, but it isn’t true. None of the arguments I am making depend on a prior assumption that physicalism is true. In fact, I often assume the opposite for the sake of argument, and then show that this assumption has some ridiculous implications or leads to predictions that are contradicted by observation.

    My assumptions are compatible with the existence of the soul. It’s the evidence that’s incompatible.

    Also, don’t forget that I grew up as a Christian. I believed in the soul then, and I continued to believe in it for some time after leaving Christianity. I didn’t become a physicalist on a whim, or because it was fashionable, or because it sounded neat. I didn’t want to be a physicalist. I reluctantly became one because the evidence persuaded me that physicalism was true.

    So please, don’t try playing the “prior beliefs” card. The arguments I’m making aren’t based on any unusual prior beliefs, and certainly not on the assumption that physicalism is true. It isn’t my assumptions you’ve been disagreeing with, it’s my conclusions. If you want to show that my conclusions are false, you need to identify flaws in my arguments. So far you’ve failed, hence the need for desperate measures such as playing the “prior beliefs” card.

  35. keiths:

    For example, we know that the brain is responsible for time-telling not just because the brain is active while we are telling time, but because physical damage to the brain can disrupt this ability.

    CharlieM:

    Physical damage to my car battery can disrupt my ability to drive into town so my car battery is responsible for my drive into town!?

    Of course not, but that’s a bad analogy. Here’s a better analogy: Suppose I claim that your battery supplies current to the starter and that this enables your car to start. You disagree. You say that your car has a soul, that the soul wants to get you to your desired destinations, and that it is the soul, not the battery, that is responsible for supplying current to the starter.

    The battery gets damaged and the car won’t start. If you were right about the car soul, that wouldn’t happen. The car soul would supply the current, the car would start, and you would drive happily into town. The fact that the car won’t start shows that the car soul, if it exists at all, is not capable of supplying current to the starter.

    I proceed to explain this, and you start quoting Sri Aurobindo and muttering about “prior beliefs”.

  36. CharlieM:

    What I don’t go along with is the belief that my brain tells me how to think and act.

    That statement shows that you are badly misunderstanding physicalism. Notice how you phrased it; you are assuming that there is a separate you that under physicalism would be bossed around by your brain. That’s not the physicalist view.

    Under physicalism, there is no separate you to be bossed around. Your brain’s thoughts are already your thoughts. You came up with them; they’re not being forced on you.

    I use my brain. When you refer to yourself as ‘I’, surely you are speaking about more than the brain?

    Don’t be misled by a quirk of language. “I think”, “I use my brain to think”, and “my brain thinks” mean the same thing. They are not contradictory. I addressed this in an earlier comment:

    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.

  37. CharlieM:

    Do you believe that the brain has sole responsibility for thinking? If you are aware that you are a thinking being, is this just your brain deluding itself? After all it’s only the brain that can have conscious thoughts, is it not? Why doesn’t it think, “I am a thinking brain inside a body”?

    You are being misled by language again. “I am a thinking being” and “my brain is a thinking entity” are not contradictory.

  38. To set the stage for today’s stupid Steiner quote, you need to know what’s going on in the figures below. In the top figure, Steiner is just trying to show that a movement from a to b is equivalent to a movement from a to c followed by a movement from c to b. It’s a simple addition of displacement vectors, in other words. In the bottom figure, he is trying to show that a force in the a-b direction can be seen as the sum of a force in the a-c direction and a force in the c-b direction. It’s a simple addition of force vectors, in other words.

    Now the hilarious part. Steiner thinks that although the magnitudes of the displacement vectors can be calculated “purely in thought”, the magnitudes of the force vectors can only be determined by direct measurement:

    What I found previously (as to the movement pure and simple), that I could calculate, purely in thought. Not so when a real pull, a real force is exercised. Here I must somehow measure the force; I must approach Nature herself; I must go on from thought to the world of facts. If once you realize this difference between the Parallelogram of Movements and that of Forces, you have a clear and sharp formulation of the essential difference between all those things that can be determined within the realm of thought, and those that lie beyond the range of thoughts and mental pictures. You can reach movements but not forces with your mental activity. Forces you have to measure in the outer world.

    Speak for yourself, Rudolf. I, along with anyone else who has passed freshman physics, have no trouble doing vector arithmetic with force vectors. Purely in thought, no less!

    Charlie, do you recognize how comically stupid that quote is?

  40. Corneel:
    Charlie: I wasn’t using it to explain the illusion.

    Corneel: Yes, you were.

    No I wasn’t. I was trying to highlight the general fact that colour relationships can evoke a sense of movement in the perceiver.

    Corneel: Given that you are now denying that you were trying to explain the optical illusion, I gather that you have accepted that your “advancing colour” explanation is bogus. That’s good, but actually I do not really care about that.

    What really bugs me is that you have started your usual backpedaling instead of “stimulating your thinking” and using some introspection to examine what led you to make these outrageous claims.

    Can you explain any faulty understanding I have, and have had from the beginning, in believing that the illusion is caused by fluctuations in the comparative brightness of the edges?

  41. keiths:
    CharlieM, regarding paradoxical lucidity:

    What is your explanation for this, keiths?

    keiths: We all know from experience that the symptoms of physical illness can wax and wane. Dementia is a physical illness, so it isn’t surprising that its symptoms too can wax and wane. I certainly experienced that when interacting with my mom during the last years of her life. Nothing about that seems incompatible with physicalism.

    Obviously sufferers do have good and bad days. People close to the sufferer witness this all the time. But the lucidity which returns close to the person’s death is at a level well beyond these fluctuations.

    keiths: What is your explanation? If paradoxical lucidity is an indication that the soul is there and functioning correctly, why did the patient lose lucidity in the first place? Why does physical damage to the brain cause the soul to lose lucidity?

    It is my belief that the brain acts as a filter so that what we actually take in from the outer world becomes greatly reduced to allow us to function in our daily lives. On the point of death when the upper members are separating from the physical body this filtering effect of brain is no longer present. Thus we experience the memories of our past life in full in a unified way and not in a linear way that the events were experienced as dictated by the earthly sequence of time. I also believe that this experience is a transient phenomenon which fades during the process of death as the soul becomes increasingly free of the physical substance which then becomes a corpse.

  42. keiths:
    CharlieM:

    I’m not sure why the Woollacott quote can’t be compatible with the eliminativist position. Can you explain it to me?

    keiths: Sure. Here’s the quote:

    Woollacott: According to the common neuroscientific view, the mind is the creation of the brain. In other words, material processes in the cerebral cortex—somehow!—generate thoughts and feelings.

    keiths: Saying that the mind is the creation of the brain doesn’t imply that the mind is an illusion, and saying that material processes generate thoughts and feelings doesn’t imply that they are illusions, either. I believe that minds, thoughts, and feelings are all real and that they are all produced by the brain. That is the common neuroscientific view.

    But it doesn’t rule out the mind being an illusion. Do you not believe that the brain creates the Mario illusion?

  43. CharlieM: Corneel:
    Charlie: I wasn’t using it to explain the illusion.

    Corneel: Yes, you were.

    No I wasn’t. I was trying to highlight the general fact that colour relationships can evoke a sense of movement in the perceiver.

    <spit-take>
    You wrote:

    I understand the effect of the radiating, bright yellow which swamps the darker colours. It is the movement of this yellow within the figures that give them the appearance of movement.

    and then

    You should look closer. I have provided a still from the illusion. The figures are edged with changing colours. We see yellow on one side of the ‘moving’ figures and then a short time later it has appeared the other side. In conjunction with the cleverly arranged changing main body colours, this displacement (movement) of the bright yellow gives the impression that the figure is moving in that direction.

    According to Goethe we see the warm yellow/red spectral colours as advancing, and the violet/blue cold spectral colours as receding. Perception of movement is an intrinsic feature of colours for our vision. Many artists use these properties to good effect in their paintings.

    and when presented with the fact that the illusion still works in grayscale, you ad-hoc’ed

    The greyscale version, as in the coloured version, works because of the manipulation of light and darkness. Black and white are equivalent to blue/violet and yellow/red taken to the extreme.

    but no, you’re not trying to explain the illusion.
    <eyeroll>

  44. CharlieM, regarding paradoxical lucidity:

    It is my belief that the brain acts as a filter so that what we actually take in from the outer world becomes greatly reduced to allow us to function in our daily lives. On the point of death when the upper members are separating from the physical body this filtering effect of brain is no longer present. Thus we experience the memories of our past life in full in a unified way and not in a linear way that the events were experienced as dictated by the earthly sequence of time. I also believe that this experience is a transient phenomenon which fades during the process of death as the soul becomes increasingly free of the physical substance which then becomes a corpse.

    That explanation doesn’t work, and the time-telling example yet again shows why. The Alzheimer’s patient knows where the hands are pointing on the clock face. The brain isn’t filtering that out. But despite knowing the hand positions, the patient can’t tell you what time it is.

    It’s a failure of cognition, not the result of filtration.

  45. Charlie,

    I can’t figure out why you’re so focused on interpreting the Woollacott quote as eliminativist.

    Let’s suppose she intended it that way and that she’s claiming that the ‘common neuroscientific view’ is eliminativist. If so, that would just mean that she and Peters are both wrong.

    Do you really believe that the majority of neuroscientists are eliminativists? Or are you just trying to defend Peters by saying that he relied on the word of a practitioner in the field, and thus shouldn’t be blamed for his false conclusion? If it’s the latter, I would point out that if Peters wants to accuse an entire an entire scientific community of holding views he considers to be pernicious and ridiculous, he should probably, you know, find out whether they actually hold those views. Over-relying on the Woollacott quote would be a mistake.

  46. Time for today’s stupid Steiner quotes.

    Those idiot physiologists think the heart is a pump:

    For let it be remembered that the physical heart is a sense organ, which perceives the movement of the blood, not a “pump” as the physiologists imagine. The spirituality and vitality of the human being — these it is that cause the movement of the blood.

    But Steiner knows better. The blood circulates itself:

    Naturally, people began to think that the heart is really a pump that mechanically pumps the blood through the body, because they no longer knew that our inner fluids have their own life and therefore move on their own. They never dreamed that the heart is only a sense organ that checks on the circulation of the fluids in its own way. The whole matter was inverted.

    The materialist scientists who think the heart pumps the blood are as stupid as someone who thinks that a clock drives time forward:

    On the other hand we have a materialistically oriented natural science which, just because it is materialistic, does not understand matter. What does natural science understand about the function of the human brain? What does natural science understand about the function of the heart, etc.? I have often showed you, and have also expressed it publically that material science holds the view, for instance, that the human heart is a kind of pump that pumps the blood in the body. This general heart science taught as university science is simply nonsense, no more or less than simple nonsense. It is really not the case that the heart is a pump that presses the blood out in all directions and again allows it to return, but the actual vitalising element is the circulating of the blood itself. There is in the blood, in the circulating blood itself, there lives what just in human existence is the actual mover of the circulation in the human organism, and the heart is only the expression of this and nothing else, The circulating movement is evident. Whoever says, in the sense of today’s natural science that the heart drives the blood into the body he speaks in approximately the same way, as though one would say: when it was ten minutes to nine the one hand was close to nine, and the other hand was over ten, and these hands along with the whole clock works have driven me up here to the podium. But that is, indeed, not so! the clock is only the expression for that which has happened.

  48. CharlieM: Can you explain any faulty understanding I have, and have had from the beginning, in believing that the illusion is caused by fluctuations in the comparative brightness of the edges?

    While composing the comment you responded to, I had initially included the offending quotes. Then, deciding it made my comment look too cluttered, I removed them again.

    And look, after you expressed your amazement that someone would have gotten the impression that you were trying to explain the Mario illusion using Goethe’s colour theory, DNA_Jock managed to find the exact quotes that I had previously included. I mean, the friggin’ exact same quotes. And here you are acting like it is ME that has been misreading some innocuous comments on “colour relationships”.

    Charlie, this is not a constructive discussion we are having and you are not “stimulating your thinking”. You are backpedaling and denying the obvious.

  49. keiths: […] do you actually agree with Steiner that electrons are immoral […]

    FWIW, I have a very negative view of electrons as well.

  50. keiths:
    CharlieM: There is no such thing as a soul on its own just as there is no such thing as a brain on its own.

    keiths: Does that mean that you disagree with Steiner about our souls’ continued existence after death? If so (which I doubt), then congratulations. If not, is this a pedantic dodge of some sort? Perhaps along the lines of “the soul is always accompanied by the astral body” or some such nonsense?

    I believe like Steiner, the physical body is transient, as is the soul. I distinguish between ‘I am’ and ‘I have’. I am a being. I have a physical body and I have a soul, but I am a spiritual being. Those are my beliefs.

    keiths: If it’s the latter, then knock it off. You know perfectly well that when I speak of the soul I am talking about any nonphysical entity or combination of entities that is distinct from the body. When I talk about what the soul can and cannot do “on its own”, I am talking about what it can and cannot do sans body.

    I have desires, passions and feelings and these are what my soul is. They are non-physical in that they cannot be weighed, counted or numbered in the way that physical entities can, but they are still dependent on my body nonetheless. Hunger is associated with chemical processes in the body, but my inner sensation of hunger and chemical reactions are not the same thing. For one thing I cannot control the chemical reactions brought on by my lack of food, but I can control how I deal with this feeling. Through the rational side of my nature I can control my appetitive desires. I can oppose what the chemistry of my body telling me.

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