The scientific evidence for immaterial mind defeats materialism – claims Dr. Egnor, a neurosurgeon affiliated with the Discovery Institute… Not so quickly – says Dr. Faizal Ali, a psychiatrist affiliated with CAMH and University of Toronto, who describes himself as an anti-creationist and a militant atheist. He believes that neural networks can be responsible for the emergence of the human mind, naturally…
Let’s look at their evidence…
“I often ask people who insist their mind is immaterial to put their money where their mouths are, by scooping out their brain and pulverizing it in a food processor, then continuing our discussion with their mental faculties still intact, as they should be if they were correct. No one has ever taken me up on this.”
Dr. Egnor does the scooping of the brains often by surgically removing the great majority of the brain… If Dr. Ali’s neural networks theory is correct, how come the mind is often not effected by the majority of the neural networks missing after surgery? This evidence would seem to support Dr. Egnor’s theory that the mind is immaterial and therefore unaffected by the majority of the brain tissue missing…
However, just like Dr. Ali seems to imply, not the whole brain can be discarded. Moreover, it is a well known fact, and both neurosurgeons and psychiatrists are well aware of the fact, that even a small damage to certain parts of the brain can shut down the entire neural networks and the immaterial mind…
So, who is right? Who is wrong?
phoodoo,
Does the supernatural realm follow rules? If you choose chocolate one day could you choose red hot lava the next? Why not?
Also, what observation is it that convinced you that the supernatural realm is in fact real?
Before we get to pondering “circumstances” we should tackle what we mean by thinking. Do computers think? Thinking must be the primal subject of this inquiry. We start with thinking and take it from there.
I have never consciously experienced a neuron firing, have you? But I have consciously experienced my own thinking. And if indeed it is true that neurons firing are accompanied by thinking I would say it is the latter that causes the former. We think and this causes a certain brain activity. And it is only through thinking that I can understand the concepts of cause and effect. Computers work in the opposite direction. Electrical activity in the circuits are the cause which produce the required effect.
We are not designed objects, we are ever changing, living beings more akin to processes than objects. The problem with design language is that it encourages us to think of organisms as equivalent to machines built by humans with brains as computers and hearts as pumps. Of course there is much more to organisms and their organs than physical machines and not just their complexity.
The machine metaphor has trapped us in a prison cell of our own making and the only way to break out of this prison is to understand how limited this metaphor is.
petrushka,
I’m not sure why some people get so exited about computers outperforming humans at chess. The main reason that they can do this is speed. They have been built to process information much faster than unassisted humans could ever do. But we have been building machines that can outperform us since the invention of the spear. A spear can move faster towards prey than any human. What is the difference between this and a chess playing computer?
Can you give us an example of any physical object that is in essence time-invariant?
How do you sense your brain cells?
Physical triangles are legion and transient. The ideal triangle is non-physical, singular, time-invariant and encompasses the essence of all physical triangles.
The supernatural can be thought of as that which sits over and above the natural.
We commonly regard human culture as separate from the natural world and so in this sense human culture is supernatural. Anything other than that which is not experienced is just speculation. It is okay to speculate but it is best not to make any unsubstantiated claims about it. That is my opinion.
To regard the physical/material as being all there is to reality is to make current human understanding the measure of what constitutes reality.
We may be about to find out.
https://futurism.com/quantum-computer-first-practical
We don’t actually know what will happen, really. But, climbing into a pyramid for a second, if as J-Mac insists brains are “the quantum” then once we achieve true quantum computing won’t that be sufficient for whatever it is that he thinks is missing from the classical variant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal
I’ll take a look at the link when I get the time. Other than that I’ll leave phoodoo to answer for himself.
I would not call time-invariant something which varies over time even if the variation is regular. And where were these crystals before the birth of any second generation stars?
From your link:
So the physical objects are not time invarient but the laws (not physical objects) may be.
Yes, which kind of love?
If the spear can learn to anticipate the evasive actions of the prey, I’d say less than charlie imagines.
The Turing threshold is successful game playing: learning to make decisions on incomplete information.
You said you sensed it. How do I know what kind you are talking about?
You brought up the example of the love of a parent for a child, is your question that specific kind of love ? Or something else?
That’s silly. What if the whole world was convinced by your rhetoric and some other crank posited the hypernatural as that which sits above the supernatural? Applying your own logic, it would be wrong to reject it, because to regard dualism as being all there is to reality would be to make current human understanding the measure of what constitutes reality. In no time, we’re forced to accept an infinite regression of levels of existence.
We don’t need to make our current understanding the measure of what constitutes reality, and nobody does that. That’s ridiculous. If that was the case, we would never learn a thing, we would never make any kind of progress, even in understanding the physical world. But clearly science is a very successful endeavor.
A chair. We can desribe a chair without needing to specify anything that changes over time.
‘Sensing’ is braincell activity. No braincells, no sensing.
The ‘ideal triangle’ is a thought process happening in someones brain and as such only exists with a time dimension (‘process’ implies the passage of time; you can’t think without time passing). Whereas a physical triangle made e.g. out of wood is an object, not a process, and as such can be described without any reference to time at all.
Yes! I asked you a specific question, and then you said, what kind of love. You said its physical because you sense it. With which sense do you sense it?
faded_Glory,
So you are not a physical object?
I am a physical object made of components that constantly interact with each other via complicated processes.
Unlike a chair.
The question is more relevant to you I think. You think you are not in your brain but rather somewhere else. When you sense things with what sense do you sense them? We know you are not using your brain, rather the brain must be passing those sensations up to the supernatural realm.
So, how do you sense anything at all?
The trajectory of the spear might involve anticipating where a moving target will be at the moment of impact. This anticipation is built in by the spear thrower. A guided missile is designed to take this a stage further and alter course during flight in order to reach the target. The chess playing computer does a similar thing but the design needs to have an enormous amount of instructions built in to control the movement of sixteen “guided missiles” while at the same time dealing with the opposing missiles intent on preventing it reaching the target. And learning is built into the design.
When my granddaughter is with us looking round garden centres she quite often looks closely at plants and touches their leaves and asks the question, “is it real”. These days some artificial plants are so realistic that it can be hard to tell initially. It is a very effective illusion. And machines designed to pass the Turing test are just the same as these plants, a very convincing illusion. They are not designed to think and be conscious, they are designed to mimic conscious thinking and they do that very well.
But at the end of the day they are just performing a very impressive illusion.
I don’t know where you think dualism fits in here. There are not just two levels of existence. There are to all intents and purposes an infinite number of levels. There is the level of existence prior to the appearance of atoms and molecules, through the level of hydrogen, to the level of substance comprising the periodic table, to the level of viruses, unicellular life, multi-cellular life, unconsciousness, basic awareness, feeling consciousness, self-aware consciousness, higher consciousnesses that no earthly creature has reached yet. These levels are not separate and discrete but run into each other.
Yes science is a very successful endeavour in learning to understand the world of the human senses. But more than that it can allow us to manipulate the world around us without even having to fully understand it, so long as it works and can be used to our benefit. Transistors were developed and utilised long before a comprehensive understanding of how they worked was established.
You seem to agree that the current general human understanding does not give us the full idea of reality. “There are more things in heaven and Earth…”
Quite so. I believe you are not alive or conscious at all, you are just performing a very impressive illusion.
So, I have created an emulation of a human brain using a supercomputer and the number of neurons is comparable to our own. I created a virtual world and brought up the virtual human being in that VR world, aging it as appropriate.
It has no idea that it is living in a virtual world. It acts just like you. It talks just like you.
And yet, it’s just a very impressive illusion.
I’m happy to accept that my conscious experience is also that sort of impressive illusion. You, it seems, are not. Yet you cannot say in my scenario above what is missing that does not make that virtual human just as real as you or I.
And do you think that your description would be complete? The chair will have had a history and without this your knowledge of it will be very limited. Chairs exist in time and if you describe a chair as in how it appears to you at one particular moment then you are giving us a description of how the chair relates to you and not a description of the chair in and of itself. There is more to the chair than how it presents itself to you at a particular time. In relation to the sun or the moon the chair is constantly moving.
Following your logic, sensing is sense organ activity. No sense organ activity, no sensing. Sensing is external phenomena. No external phenomena, no sensing. Sensing is consciousness. No consciousness, no sensing.
But the one vital ingredient that allows us to come to these conclusions is thinking. We begin by thinking and our senses give us entities which we direct our thinking towards. I doubt that you have experienced brain cell activity through any of your senses. You have probably been told or read that brain activity accompanies thinking. But how do you know which is cause and which is effect? Does thinking cause brain activity or does brain activity cause thinking? Before jumping to any conclusions I would advise anyone to think carefully about questions such as these.
The ideal triangle is not a thought process, it is a concept that is arrive at through the act of thinking. In the same way a wooden triangle is not a sense process it is something that is perceived using the senses. The ideal triangle in my thoughts is not just identical with the ideal triangle in someone else’s thoughts, it is the one and only ideal triangle. It is singular. It is one example of an entity that is not governed by the laws of space and time.
Your wooden triangle is governed by the laws of time and space and so much as you would like to disregard time and space in its description, you cannot do this.
But your definition of a physical object was something that doesn’t change over time. You realize nothing like that exists right?
Omagain continues to whine about why he can’t touch the supernatural.
Its too painful for him to bear.
I’m under no illusion that I am without illusions. I suffer from illusions just like everyone else 🙂 Some Eastern sages believe and have believed that the world is Maya, an illusion, and I agree with this sentiment.
But there is one experience I have that I know is mine and that is my thinking. It may be right or it may be wrong but it is definitely mine.
If totally human creations can eventually be produced which think, feel and will in the way that we do then we could consider ourselves gods.
I notice that it would not be enough for you to emulate a brain, you have also emulated an environment for it to interact with. So it may be a false, illusiary world in the world of your experience, but for your created supercomputer it is the actual real world in which it exists. And who knows, it may be perfectly content living in its own little, limited world.
Congratulations, you have progressed from being a creature to being a creator. Consider yourself a god 🙂
Err, no it wasn’t.
He stated of physical objects “They can be defined without reference to how they change over time.”
You realize that that is different, right?
DNA_Jock,
Love can’t be defined without reference to change over time? Beauty? Goodness? Power? Fun?
The relevant question that I would like others to answer is, are there any physical objects that are not transient?
My answer is no. Does anyone disagree?
Of course there aren’t. A table could be clean and shiny one day, and dusty and broken another. Dark color one day, and weathered with holes in it another. Its a ridiculous definition, and one no one needs to accept as true.
Not exactly. While there is nothing absolutely static over endless time, there are certainly degrees of change and rates of change. Something that changes significantly day to day could be considered qualitatively different in this respect from something changes very little over hundreds of millions of years. Consider that a river might exist for many millions of years, yet you can’t step into the same river twice because it’s constantly changing!
I think you have generalized the notion of transience to the point where it’s nearly meaningless.
And you continue to have no good answer to how it reveals your complete hypocricy and the intellectual vacuousness of your position.
In your material/immaterial distinction. My point was that your reasoning here is clearly faulty:
You overlook a very important option: Neurons firing is thinking.
Again, not what faded_glory wrote.
He wrote
So, to answer your questions, all of your ‘intangibles’ require physical things with which to work. Furthermore, Love Power, and Fun all require a time dimension.
Defining Goodness requires an all-powerful creator, or so I’ve been told.
Beauty is an interesting one, though: you’ll have to arm-wrestle Charlie to determine whether Grecian Urns are “transient” or not. He says Yes, but Keats says No.
ETA: I had forgotten that Crick’s “What mad pursuit” is a reference to the same poem, too.
I disagree. An iron-56 nucleus is not transient.
Depending on the time frame and the cosmological constant.
I’ll disagree with that.
Thinking may involve neuron firing. But not all neuron firing is related to thinking.
For a consistent metaphysical naturalism, the relation between the intentional and sensory contents of consciousness and neuronal activity is neither cause and effect not simple identity but that between appearance and reality.
Thinking could be neuron firing without all neuron firing being thinking.
The more I ponder on this, the more convinced I become that this must be a loop, initiated by neurons firing, which produces the sensation of thinking, and the ‘thinking’ alters subsequent patterns of neurons’ firing.
To answer your question, I have consciously experienced a small group of neurons (a few dozen) failing to fire. In fact, I am right now. The surrounding neurons are still firing normally, and I am very much aware of the difference.
I see the neuron firing as an implementation detail, rather than the thinking itself.
Faizal:
Neil:
walto:
Yes, and the real question for dualists is whether thinking happens in the absence of neuronal firing, and if so, how do they know that?
Here’s an odd implication of Egnor’s view: Abstract thinking should be less impaired by intoxication than concrete thinking is, since the former is carried out by the immaterial mind while the latter takes place in neural tissue.
It must, if you can remove most of the brain with no discernible effect.
DNA_Jock,
THIS is what he said, quote miner:
Its both stupid and wrong. No wonder you believe it.
If its worth arguing about and discussing then its not meaningless. And you bring up some points that are worth contemplating. You say nothing is absolutely static. That is what I was getting at. Everything physical is in a state of flux.
You also say that you can’t step into the same river twice (or even once). Consider the Mississippi. The river has been in existence for millions of years. But we know that the physical substance of which the river is comprised is constantly changing. The river is much more enduring than its physical material. So on contemplating the river we come to realise that it has an existence over and above its physical substance. Its flowing waters give it a plant-like, living ethereal quality.
IMO this distinction is the same distinction is the similar to the way we distinguish solids, liquids and gasses. Different manifestations of the one substance. This is a monistic view. There are higher aspects to physical material that are beyond the ability of our coarse senses to detect.
Have you ever directly seen, touched, felt, smelled or heard neurons firing? Have you ever directly thought about anything. You infer the former (neuron firing) but you directly experience the latter (thinking). Any enquiry begins with thought and things start to get tricky when we jump straight in to making assumptions.