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?
It is subject to change over time which is what I was getting at.
The problem is that when we think that we have arrived at reality such as with our understanding of fundamental “particles” what we are actually doing is transferring factors of our sense experiences into this atomic world. Atomic particles became “billiard ball” and subsequently “gas clouds”. We treat the world of our experience as being less than real and then we say that there is an actual reality behind the world of experience. But all we are doing is adding a world which is unavoidable based on our sense experiences and then we become surprised when this world does not obey the rules of the macro world which we know well and partake in.
That is not at all how scientific practices generate explanations.
Charlie has a very odd take on physics. Apparently, if observation and experiment leads to non-obvious conclusions, there is something wrong with observation and experiment.
Wonder what he makes of stage magic.
This is where we disagree. I don’t think concepts exist anywhere but in the brains of people as and when they think about them. Does your ideal triangle exist if there are no people to consider it? I don’t think so! If you disagree, please elucidate where precisely it exists other than in thoughts.
Can something exist without there being a ‘where’ where it exists? Sounds like nonsense to me.
That is not relevant to my objection at all.
The issue was about physical and non-physical. Physical stuff is made up of elemental particles, atoms, molecules. Non-physical ‘stuff’ is interactions and processes between physical ‘stuff’ (and therefore requires the passage of time to exist).
What you seem to want is non-physical ‘stuff’ that somehow isn’t physical but still is ‘stuff’. This makes absolutely no sense to me, and leads to bizarre notions like abstractions existing as ‘stuff’ in some kind of ‘non-physical’ domain. None of which has ever been demonstrated.
Only from people who didn’t have much of a brain to begin with.
This is a prime example of reification. The ‘river Mississippi’ is nothing but a concept in the brains of people. The actual physical entity is just a mass of water flowing in a certain place during a certain time. That is all. This then gets reified by people as if it exists as a separate, somehow special entity – ‘plant-like’, ‘etheral’!
That we as humans can group certain phenomena together and give them a label doesn’t make these phenomena suddenly special or non-physical. You are constantly confusing the external physical reality with our internal human concepts and classification of it. This is a mistake. The map is not the territory.
faded_Glory,
Gravity doesn’t exist!
Dam, that sucks. No more Earth.
faded_Glory:
Wouldn’t you describe the latter as ‘physical processes’?
Quite. Gravity is a process, not a ‘thing’. It is the process that happens between bodies caused by their gravitational mass (which is a ‘thing’).
I would advise anyone who has views on the mind/body relationship to watch this video,
“Epilepsy Conference Dr. Siegward Elsas”
The methods that he proposes for dealing with epilepsy tackles its source and does not go straight to the neurons that are “misfiring” and try to deal with them which is the standard procedure. This latter way tries to prevent the brain activity. In other words it deals with the symptoms (the brain) and not the source (the mind).
At about 14 and a half minutes Dr. Siegward Elsas:who is a neurologist says:
I know from experience that by taking control it is possible for me to influence my brain activity. Through concentrated self-conscious thinking I can alter the course of events which my brain activity is preparing to make happen. We can all do this.
Don’t you think the conscious mind could initiate the loop.
I would be interested to know what direct sensations you get of neurons firing and how you know out of the billions of neurons in your body you can tell that it is these specific few dozen neurons which are inactive.
I am not talking about the way science works, I am talking about the way the average person views what they take to be reality. Scientist might be able to distinguish their models from reality but it is not always easy to convey this to the listening public.
No, I think that would be impossible. How would that even work?
The neurons in question occupy a small contiguous region in the retina of my left eye.
It’s not whether or not we find our conclusions to be non-obvious, it’s whether or not we jump to premature conclusions.
As soon as you introduce the concept, “where” you then have to ask where it is in relation to something other. The ideal triangle is absolute, not relative. It has its being without any considerations of time and space. It is not in my brain or your brain or anybody else’s brain. It is an objective concept which we are able to grasp through thinking. We don’t produce the concept we discover it. A mental picture of a triangle is a representation of some physical triangle. This is not the concept triangle. The mental picture in our heads, just like any physical triangle is just a representation of the ideal triangle. And we get a better idea of it when we think of it more as a process than a thing because it encompasses all sizes and shapes of normally perceived triangles. It is no single size and no single shape. We could say that it is the archetypal triangle.
I have tried to clarify my views by giving an example of a non-physical entity in the ideal triangle.
But I find it interesting that even if we stick to discussing what we think of as physical we are immediately confronted by the distinction between classical physics and quantum physics. We might have a picture in our minds of elementary particles as extremely small occupying points in space. But from quantum physics it becomes obvious that they can be thought of as occupying all of space. The extremely large volume out to the periphery belongs to the domain of elementary “particles” just as much as any particular point. Distance has no influence on entanglement.
CharlieM,
The ‘ideal triangle’ is just a mental concept, and therefore it exists as a thought in the brains of people thinking about it. If you claim that it has objective existence apart from that, the onus is on you to demonstrate that. Frankly, I am at a loss to think how you could even begin to do so.
As far as metaphysics goes, I am rather more interested in what is established by our best science than I am in whatever ideology is accepted by “the listening public”.
Definitions are not arguments Eric. Definitions are attempts to describe something in a sentence or so.
You have many philosophical problems. I’d advice you to take a good course in philosophy and to take it seriously.
As far as we know, yes, everything is physical.
Of course. They physically exist. I physically exist. If we didn’t, we could not love each other. If we didn’t we could not have any feelings.
The river Mississippi is as separate from the water as I am from the blood streaming through my body or a plant is from the sap rising in its stems. Why do you say that it’s separate?
You say that the Mississippi is in reality just a mass of flowing water. I say that it is a mass of flowing water, a vital part of the water cycle in North America, a transport link, a boundary, a natural habitat for a multitude of organisms, and much more besides.
Which of us has the more realistic understanding of the river?
You think that the ideal triangle compared to a physical triangle is as a map to the territory? I think you are confusing the ideal triangle with the mental image of a triangle. If you think that the ideal triangle is a copy of any physical triangle then you do not understand what I mean by the term. Physical triangles; scalene, equilateral, isosceles triangles of all sizes, and mental images of these are all included in the ideal triangle but do not comprise its fullness. These are the models, these are limited. The closest we can come to this in the form of a mental image cannot be static, it would have to include movement. But movement suggests time so even this does not quite align with the concept. The ideal triangle is not limited by time and space.
Yes it would be taken as impossible for those who believe that thinking is nothing but a material process.
Surely when you say that you, “have consciously experienced a small group of neurons (a few dozen) failing to fire”, what you actually experience is a partial lack of sight in the same way that we can all experience our blind spot in each eye. You don’t experience neuron activity through the senses, it is something you add to the process by thinking.
When a falconer pus a hood over his or her bird does it experience a cessation of neurons firing or do you think it experiences darkness where previously it experienced sight of its surroundings?
I would like to know what exactly you mean by “conscious experience”?
If it exists in the brains of people, I would say that the onus is on you to demonstrate where it is located and that it actually is what you say it is and that any accompanying brain processes are not just an effect of mental effort or mental pictures of actual triangles.
If we study an external object, say a parakeet, our senses give us a multitude of perceptions of this object and it is not until we combine these in the correct relationship that we come to an understanding that this object is actually a parakeet. This combination is achieved through thinking. But in our route to understanding, as well as looking outward we can also look inward. We have mental images of triangles, ideas of three-foldness, inner and outer, and we can combine and relate these with our thinking and thereby come to the concept triangle. The concept triangle no more depends on my activity than a parakeet depends on my activity for its existence. Both have an objective existence that does not depend on my thinking about them.
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But the “best science” has an impact on our health and education and if it is financed by interested parties, especially parties that have a financial interest, then we may be getting led down false paths. I would ask: What is our best science and how is it being used?
It would be naive to believe that science is free from ideology.
Did you watch the video I linked to?
You did not answer my question. How would the conscious mind initiate neuronal activity in a quiescent nervous system? Kegeling?
so far so good
Aaarrgh! No! What a terrible example!
We all experience the senses through neuronal activity, not the other way around. The blind spot in your eye is an amazing demonstration of the fact that what we “consciously experience” is a synthesis, a confection created by our brains (Read up on Size-, Lightness-, and Color- constancy). You do NOT experience a gap in your visual field due to your blind spot. What is unusual about my left eye is the failure to fire of a small, select group of neurons that used to work just fine. Which I experience, consciously. There was a period when a much larger group of neurons was failing to fire. Thankfully, that went away, when those neurons got their act together.
I think the falcon experiences a dramatic reduction in neuronal firing throughout it’s retinae, which the brain interprets as “darkness”.
By “conscious experience”, I mean the experiences that I am conscious of.
There is a vast body of research studying the relationship of neuronal activity to perception. Some things continue to be the subject of debate, but the correlation between neuronal activity and perception is pretty impressive, as demonstrated when small contiguous regions of the brain (or eye…) stop working.
DNA_Jock,
I’ll give what you say here more thought when I get the time, but meanwhile I’ll just reiterate that you don’t have a sense experience of neurons firing.
Have a look at this site or any similar site and carry out the exercises. I find the one with the moving red dot to be effective. Now describe what you experience, not what you think is happening behind the scenes as it were. I experience the red dot disappearing from my field of vision and then reappearing as it moves towards the + sign.
If you are happy to do so, tell us what you experience directly. Anyone else is free to do the same.
As I already explained to you, I have the experience of neurons NOT firing. I encourage you to do more thinking, and caution you against telling me (repeatedly) what I do or do not experience.
Ironically, over a decade ago, I did a couple of “Science Nights” at my daughters’ Elementary School, using ten optical illusions to illustrate visual perception. Blind Spot is the most basic one. Check out the Waterfall Effect, the Spiral Effect, or the McCollough effect, which is quite the creepiest, as it can last a long time [three months! WTF? When I demonstrated McCollough, I did not let the parents / drivers do it, as I knew the effect could last a while…]
Perhaps you can explain the incredibly specific ways that your “immaterial mind” gets tired. As I wrote above regarding the blind spot:
My experience is QUITE different.
A sector of my visual field is a dark purplish blotch. That’s a direct experience of neurons not firing. The adjacent field is perfectly fine. It is utterly unlike the blind spot.
And you did not explain how your immaterial mind could initiate neuronal activity in a quiescent nervous system.
CharlieM,
Why limit this to triangles? What this boils down to is that you claim that anything you can think of, actually exists somewhere as an objective entity outside your thoughts and your brain.
Sorry to interject, but I don’t know who those would be. Or if DNA_Jock thinks that way. As of me, I think that thinking is an interesting and complex physical/chemical process. How about you? Do you think that thinking is nothing but an immaterial blob?
This is an unrealistic question because the nervous system is always active. It is also framed from the perspective of dualism where the mind and body are seen as separate. I do not see things in this way.
Did you watch the video I linked to? Dr. Elsas speaks about controlling epilepsy using the mind. Sleep is similar to epilepsy in that both conditions involve losing conscious control.
After spending decades in a job which involved a half hour drive home after working a twelve hour night shift I have had a lot of experience fighting against my need for sleep. This is an example of taking conscious control of the physical process of going to sleep. There were a few times I felt that I would lose the battle before reaching home and so I had to pull over and have a nap in the car. The material processes undoubtedly win out in the end, but the mind does have some measure of control over these processes.
Have you heard of experience-dependent neuroplasticity? The way we behave, think and feel shapes our neural connections.
I’d never heard of kegeling before you mentioned it.
Have you ever wondered about how it is that the prefrontal lobes sit on the “outside”(aka evolved later than, and were in some sense grown “on top”) of the rest of the brain and is capable of suppressing and controlling the deeper more instinctive desires and reactions you have? And how things like drugs and alcohol affect how much control you have? And how things like prefrontal development correlates with self-control and “mature” behavior? Why are teenagers and children so comparatively unruly and have less control than adults?
I’m not talking about a scientific understanding of cognition, I’m talking about the first person account of experience. I understand that this direct experience involves our senses, memory and nervous system but I am asking you to say what you “see”.
Did you read what I wrote above?
And once we have established an initial recognition of an animal referred to as a parakeet then, if our power of memory is normal, we will recognise one in future. We do not experience a multitude of various types of somatic cells and associated substances and recognise this arrangement as a parakeet. We experience the movement, colour, sounds, shape and other perceptions we know from past experience to be a parakeet. We experience qualia, not neurons.
You wrote, “We all experience the senses through neuronal activity, not the other way around”. Which means that we do not experience neuronal activity through the senses, which is what I’ve been saying all along. So in what way do you experience neuronal activity or lack there of?
I would not think that falcons have any awareness whatsoever of neurons, but I’m sure that when they are plunged into darkness they would be aware of that.
I have no argument with any of that.
My mind and body are not separate. My body gets tired having to serve my mind. Mental effort can sometimes give me a physical headache. I don’t know about you but I find that sitting behind a desk doing mental work is far more tiring than doing hours of physical labour.
No that is a direct experience of a dark purplish blotch not neurons.
We experience visual illusions as sensations of colour, shade, movement, relative positions of objects or whatever the illusion is designed to invoke.
Over and above this we can gain an understanding of the reasons why these illusions have the effects that they do. We understand why we have certain experiences.
I used the triangle as an example because it is a relatively simple two dimensional shape that has definite, essential qualities.
No, not everything. We have to distinguish between that which is objective and that which is just a subjective product of our imagination. I can imagine a hybrid between a horse and a centipede but I know that no such entity exists.
Don’t be sorry. A discussion is better the more people contribute with their individual points of view.
No I don’t think that thinking is an immaterial blob.
It is a representation of the ideal purplish blotch, which we arrive at by thinking, I suppose.
Quite so. Now, how do you propose we can do this distinguishing in a reliable manner? I hope your are not channeling FFM and rely on ‘revelation’?
The purplish blotch does not exist. My brain is NOT fooled into thinking that it does. I cannot fathom how I could be having the direct experience of something that I know does not exist. By the same token, Tammy Duckworth has the “direct experience” of a nail being hammered into her heel. That’s moronic.
Between your “I’m not talking about a scientific understanding of cognition, I’m talking about the first person account of experience.” and your “I would not think that falcons have any awareness whatsoever of neurons,…” you have conveniently eliminated the direct experience of neurons not firing by definition. Congratulations. Doesn’t change my experience one iota, however.
Corneel,
Yes, “thinking” is being misused as much as “experience”, I am afraid.
LOL.
I wonder about this sort of thing all the time.
IMO evolution is development on a higher level. The flower usually comes towards the end of a plant’s development and out of the flower comes the seed which gives rise to the next generation. The prefrontal cortex is equivalent to the flower. It is the means by which we can express our creativity. Inventiveness begins in the mind and by means of the brain we can apply our language and dexterous skills to transform our thoughts into actual products. If we think about what we are doing when we participate at this site we can follow the action. Our senses take in what has been entered by others. From previous learning we are able to understand the writings without having to repeat the process of combining individual symbols into meaningful indicators. If and when we compose our replies I would hope that we give some thought to what we are about to write. Here it is our thinking that stimulates our brain activity.
Alcohol and drugs can interfere with the control we otherwise have over these processes. Sleep also causes us to lose control, but in a beneficial way.
The process of development though childhood into adulthood is a journey whereby the ego takes greater control over thinking, feeling, willing and bodily movements. Instinctive, automatic behaviour gives way to conscious behaviour. Of course it is normal to achieve only partial success in this. But evolution is potentially open ended.
Doesn’t the horstipede exist just as much as the ideal triangle you imagine?
I think we should think about this further before jumping to any conclusions. Did you do the exercise? Did you experience a dark purple blotch? When I do the exercise I have a peripheral image of the red spot moving to the right it disappears and then reappears closer to the + sign. I don’t notice any purple blotch which makes me think that this aspect of the image we see is not an objective process on the screen but a subjective image due to an objective feature of the eye of the beholder.
That are my initial thoughts.
Well because of our unique positions in space and time any image we perceive is subjective, I see it from the point of view of myself and no one else.
But two of us can look at the same image of the uppercase Greek letter Delta and agree that it is triangular. That is because we understand the concept triangle. We share this concept. This is the objective feature which is independent of the number and position of any observer.
It is easy to see this in the case of a simple triangle, it takes much more effort to separate the subjective from the objective when it comes to more complex entities. This is why we all have unconscious biases in our thinking. Sometimes we think we are being totally objective, but is this really the case? That is why to “know thyself” is such a hard undertaking.
Yes, we share the concept of a triangle – that is because we have both been raised in human society where we get taught the concept of a triangle. That doesn’t mean that triangles exist as independet concepts (other than as instantiated bits of stuff) outside of our thoughts.
Looks like you got confused. It is DNA_Jock that perceives a blotch in his visual field, not me. As he explained it, this phenomenon is caused by a specific defect in his retina, which he acquired later in life. That explains why you nor me can perceive it.
Is that how you separate objective real concepts from subjective imaginary things? By consensus?
ETA: clarification