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?
walto,
here are a few simple questions for you to answer if you feel like it:
Does an acorn have the potential to become a full grown oak tree?
Do all acorns achieve their full potential?
Does chance play a part in its destiny?
If you answer yes, no and yes, then I’ll happily say we are in agreement.
Destiny: the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future.
So no, chance does not. Otherwise it’s not destiny!
I’m not a fan of looking up dictionary meanings and quoting them. I prefer to use a bit of common sense. Few would object to someone saying, “She was destined for great things, but…” (fill in some factual event that interfered with the subject’s future).
Call it what you want, would you argue against the belief that future trajectories can be determined by chance events?
Two short articles by physicists Carroll and Rovelli on cause, agency, and related topics.
https://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/236
(Dretske gets a “he thought of these ideas first” S/O from Rovelli).
Crows are believed to pass on knowledge of dangerous people to succeeding generations. This observation by experiment.
They also learn by observing other crows.
So culture is not an all or nothing thing.
I’m a fan of the late great Dretske.
I’m not sure what you mean by either “potential” or “chance,” but I’ll agree to this:
Take a random acorn I see on the ground in the woods. It’s consistent with everything I know that it may become a full grown oak tree and that it may not. And if “chance” means “the stuff I don’t know” then chance absolutely plays a part in what will happen to that little guy.
I’d also agree to this:
Take a random acorn I see on the ground in the woods. It’s metaphysically possible that it may become a full grown oak tree and it’s metaphysically possible that it may not. Which of those happens is contingent.
That’s about the best I can do for you.
By potential I mean that given the right conditions it has the capacity to develop into a mature oak tree. You could make a very accurate replica of an acorn out of clay and no matter where you planted it or what the circumstances were it would never turn into an oak tree. It lacks the potential.
And chance is just what it is. Say a squirrel buried an acorn which could then be dug up and eaten at a later time. Meanwhile the squirrel is killed by a predator, then the chance that the squirrel was at the wrong place at the wrong time enabled the acorn to be at the right place at the right time to grow to maturity. Call it chance, call it contingency, I don’t mind. At least there is some agreement between us.
It is interesting to me that you use the term “metaphysical” and not “physical”. Can you explain why you used that particular term? Thank you for your responses.
Using “capacity” instead of “potential” achieves nothing. And yes, chance (like everything else) is “what it is.” That kind of nonsense is what one expects from a Steinerian.
Metaphysical possibility/necessity are different from physical possibility/necessity. The first is a matter of what is possible, regardless of what the physical laws are–some think of this as what is conceivable. So, e.g. a round square is metaphysically impossible, but a flying elephant (on earth) is metaphysically possible in spite of being physically impossible. That 2 + 2 = 4 is metaphysically necessary (as well as physically necessary), but that, on earth, a tossed baseball lands eventually is only physically necessary.
As to there being agreement between us on chance and contingency, who knows. I certainly don’t know what you mean by either of those terms. I’m not sure you have a very clear notion yourself. That comes from exclusively reading bad philosophy. The material you revel in is so unclear on important matters that, in the end, while you’re talking a lot, it turns out you really don’t have much idea of what you’re saying.
Goethe said to Jacobi that God had punished him with metaphysics, maybe you too are similarly afflicted 🙂
If you were to see an acorn sprouting in the ground and you paid frequent visits to the site over a few years you might just experience the physical process of the transformation without having to burden yourself with any metaphysics. It could be that reality is there for us to see without us add any abstractions that are supposedly lying behind the phenomenon.
What is the alternative here? Try to think about it for a moment, what it is you are proposing happens instead.
It seems to me that you will always choose what you will choose and there is a perfectly good and consistent explanation and cause for what you do. Whether that is because of the laws of physics(as in you are like a computer-controlled robot with complex environmentally-sensitive programming), or some sort of inherent desire you have (your immaterial soul just likes chocolate more, and will given those exact same circumstances always pick chocolate in that situation). Either way, you end up with only one result given that exact circumstance even though other results can be imagined.
But you seem to be saying that there is something about choice that entails that given the exact same situation, you would some times pick pistachio, and perhaps once in a rare while you’d even pick strawberry. That given all the same inputs, the exact same life-history, same genes, everything identical down to the last atom, choice is some times fundamentally unpredictable and random? And so you would, for no discernable reason, pick strawberry. Because what? What is the explanation for why you would choose differently given the same exact situation and the same exact selection of flavors before you?
Your immaterial soul makes your inherent personality and desires stochastically fluctuate such that your desires randomly change some times?
Whatever the nature of your personality is(immaterial, supernatural?), it has a random and unpredictable element where there is no cause or explanation for why you some time change in a way that even if you were put in the same exact situation, your pick would be different?
Just because something is unpredictable does not mean no cause or explanation.
For example, if we have true teleology, then events cannot be explained by the past (i.e. are unpredictable), but can be explained by the future.
So, it is logically possible to have unpredictable events that have causal explanations.
This is what libertarian free will is: something that is not determined by the past, but can be explained by the future.
This used to be my holdup, too, but then I learned about intelligent design and I became enlightened.
EricMH,
That didn’t make any sense. Reads like content-free rhetoric.
Events that are determined by what must happen in the future are just as no less predetermined than those determined by what happened previously.
Sounds like he’s jockeying for a paying position at the Discovery Institute.
Rumraket,
The alternative is that all choices are possible.
That you are a free thinking individual and there are no restrictions on your choice. Given the EXACT same state of chemical constructions more than one result is possible. Almost as if your mind is a quantum, undermined entity, so in a supernatural state, all outcomes are possible, not just one.
No, because it is a supernatural state, and not a physical one, trying to describe the state, or fully imagine the autonomy of the individual, our ability to fully describe this kind of autonomy is always going to be limited, because it is supernatural after all. Language for describing the supernatural will always lag behind language to describe the physical. Because the physical is only what it is, whereas the supernatural is things we can’t see or touch or draw a picture of. So one must accept that limitation, without trying to claim it should be able to be clarified the same as the physical “what is it.”
So there you go. I believe almost everyone even knows intuitively this is true, that their choices are unbound. Its like trying to describe infinity, both impossible, but also somewhat within our grasp of imagination. Yet not fully.
Or like describing what is imagination. You can’t describe it, you can only experience it.
The laws of physics are deterministic in the sense that its laws plus the universal (quantum) state at any time t determine the (quantum) state at the universe at any other time t, including past times.* So it is also true that the current state of the universe, including the state of you, determines the past states. So do your choices determine the past? ‘Determines’ is not useful for free will discussions when the word is used in the sense it is used in physics, which is the usual scientific domain for discussing determinism.
When discussing free will and teleology, one needs to separate scientific determination from scientific causation. There is no causation in the microstate explanations of physics; causation is instead an emergent, macrostate phenomena which is part of the other, “higher level” sciences.
Now Eric talks about explanation , not causation, but scientific explanations beyond microstate physics involve causation, so the two are linked.
I believe Eric’s view of teleology involves claims that a future desired state by some intelligent designer is one of that future state’s causes and hence its explanation. He thinks this type of causation is not part of what can be explained by materialist science (which is not to say that you are a materialist!). Since human intelligence can design things, it too requires non-materialist explanation. That is how I understand some of Eric’s comments.
But science can explain how human intelligence can represent a future and then act to bring that about, without involving any other forms of causation than the usual efficient causation. So I think Eric is wrong in making such claims.
———————————
* Quantum determinism may not be true if one takes the GRW interpretation of QM
Determinism makes a hash of beloved concepts, such as responsibility.
Right.
But I disagree with keiths rationalization for the physical determinism, by just sweeping it under the rug and saying, yea, but its easy, just choose-no contradiction.
But of course there is a contradiction, if you really believe in only the physical.
When I read nonsensical fluff posted over and over again for no reason whatever, must I burden myself with that?
Is Eric invoking retrocausality again?
Here’s the last jaw-dropping exchange I had with him on the topic:
Eric:
keiths:
petrushka, playing devil’s advocate:
keiths:
Eric:
Let that sink in. Eric is claiming that my behavior is magically retrocaused by a future event that never even happens.
And for those who believe in immaterial, the problem is how the immaterial manipulates the material.
How would you know if they are all possible?
How would you know that? Can we decide to fly by flapping our amrs? Nope. we can try but that won’t happen. There! A restriction. Therefore you’re not a free-thinking individual? Does being a free-thinking individual require absolutely no restrictions on your choices? What does that, free-thinking, mean? I think that the discussion is more philosophical than scientific.
How would you know if more than one result is possible? How would you make sure that the “chemical constructions” are exactly the very same? How would you be able yo account for each particular in the chemical/physical “construction”? How would you know that more than one result is not possible given the complexity of such “constructions”? How do you know that your interactions with everything else doesn’t make a dent in your choices?
You do know that quantum “undetermined” entities are physical and natural, right? Given that, how would you know if that has very complex events, enough to “account” for more than one possible outcome/choice?
That’s what you believe. I think that our limitations to “describing” whatever you think you’re describing (free choice? Pseudofree-choice?), in terms of physics/chemistry, are due to philosophical problems and limited knowledge of the physical/chemical. We don’t know everything. We cannot know everything. Therefore we cannot explain everything. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything “supernatural.” It just means there’s a lot to learn, and a lot, perhaps, that we might never be able to figure out.
Whereas the supernatural is that which we imagine when we’re left with unsatisfying answers. Unsatisfying because of our physical/chemical/[hylosophical limitations.
If it cannot be clarified, then it doesn’t help. It looks a lot like imagination to me. Surprising that you would not understand why, even if you disagree.
No more to say that I didn’t say above.
Nope. Not a single contradiction.
The only contradiction here is between phoodoo and the dictionary.
keiths,
You clearly don’t understand what alternatives means.
What may be; or maybe not be,
your burden pre-planned destiny?
God forbid the very thought,
must this be your karmic lot?
If you must suffer fools, don’t forget there is no gain without pain 🙂
I don’t know what you mean by possible. I think other options are conceivable, as in we can imagine them and they are logically possible in the sense that they don’t imply a contradiction. But you seem to be saying something else. That they are possible in a different sense. That they are possible in a sense where some times, if we could re-run the tape over and over again, it would play out differently. Do you mean that given the exact same situation you some times would pick differently? Is there any limitation to this? Given the same situation, would you pick chocolate almost every time? And like, one in a trillion trillion trillion re-runs, you’d pick vomit-flavor for an occult reason?
So the supernatural is synonymous with the occult. Something that is unknowable and hidden. And you’re fine with that, with there being just no explanation and we should just shut up about it.
Literally that it just happens? What you want to pick just happens and it can’t ever be known why. It just happens, that’s all.
How do you fail to implode from the irony?
Well I’m not going to accept that limitation. I want to know, and I think your occultist “supernaturalism” is an excuse people give when they have no good answers.
I don’t. Call me weird, or a liar. But I don’t.
Irony? I don’t think you understand that word.
That’s the essential problem for you, isn’t it. You think that if something can’t be completely known and understood in this lifetime, then it can’t be real. So you whinge about, and say, “Oh how can you be so gullible, don’t you know all of life is everything you see in front of you, and if it can’t be explained by calipers and a microscope, then it be damned I deny it!” Instead you just hold steadfast with your faith that someday we will figure it all out, please please!
And yet you haven’t figured it out and you never will. You hope that emergence, or some other dumb substitute for magic will suffice and you will continue to whine forever, that someday we will figure it out, We are smart. “Explain it, explain it, explain God, show me a picture, explain consciousness, its just chaos, it has no meaning, don’t fool me….”
All the evidence in the world could never convince someone like you, you want a manual and a coloring book to draw it.
No, not at all. Obviously there are many things that will be found out by future generations long after I’m gone. Things that have real answers that we don’t currently know or understand. And for many past generations there were people who lived and died without knowing things that later generations found out. Sorry man but what you’re saying is obviously false.
What I refuse to accept is the claim that there is some things we should simply accept can’t be known on your mere say-so. How do you know it can’t be known? You obviously don’t, you just declare it to be supernatural and define the supernatural to be unknowable. Occult.
I think if you can satisfy yourself with the idea that it can’t be known, you’re not going to bother trying to find out if you are even right about it’s purported unknowability. It’s a dead end for the intellect, for innovation, and for curiosity.
I will happily go to my grave trying to find out and risk not succeeding, than giving up at the starting line and defining the question unsolvable.
That may be fine with you, but it’s not for me. Thanks but no thanks.
We seem to understand just fine how microorganisms and even worms and insects are capable of making decisions down to the molecular level. And we didn’t get to understand that by listening to people like you, thank goodness. You can go wallow gleefully in your ignorance all you like, the rest of us will move on.
You making this caricature is a perfect example of that irony you say I don’t understand. It is you who is constantly demanding that materialists explain how X works, and when they can’t do it to your satisfaction, you declare victory and define it to be unknowable. How ironic, too, that you start by scolding me by attributing to me the view that if it can’t be completely known and understood in this lifetime, then it can’t be real.
Please, look in a mirror. Look at what you wrote literally in the very same post.
phoodoo,
“Dumb substitute for magic” is actually a pretty good description of the immaterial mind/soul/whatever.
…says phoodoo, providing no evidence whatsoever that choices really are unbound.
phoodoo,
If I pick chocolate, I get chocolate. If I pick vanilla, I get vanilla. There are two alternatives, and the alternative I select is the one I get.
This is not difficult.
Dumb substitute for magic he says, then literally suggests magic, which doesn’t explain shit. You can’t make this up.
So says Yoda, with ideological support from the Enlightened Emerald City of Seattle and its activistic Discovery Institute?
Nota Bene: IDists who avoid or ignore all ‘real design theory,’ ‘real design theorists’ and ‘real design thinkers’ & then claim ‘design theorists’ are persecuted and ‘design’ is being unfairly, politically disallowed in the Academy, shall be themselves ignored.
Haha…who told you that?
The faith of the skeptical can never be underestimated. Materialism will win one day, please pretty please…
Its not an alternative if you only could ever pick the chocolate. Go back and study up on alternatives.
If I say “You have a choice, I can either give you 2 million dollars or I can give you an old rusty carburetor I found on the side of the road, which do you choose.” Then you say, “ok, I will take the 2 million dollars”, and I say, “No, you can’t have the 2 million” the fact that I said I was giving you two choices doesn’t mean there were two choices.
If you had chosen the rusty carburetor, and I never told you I was never going to give you the 2 million, the fact that you THINK I would have given you the 2 million instead, even though I never would have, that doesn’t make it an alternative. Its the illusion of an alternative.
Complex thinking Keiths. Spend some time on it.
Rumraket,
Me: It can’t be completely understood by physics alone because it is based in a realm outside the material existence.
You: Its material, it will be understood one day..please please.
Me: No, it can’t be explained by simple physics.
You: How ironic!
Me: You don’t know what ironic means.
But maybe one day you can explain irony, in terms of atoms. Keep the faith.
phoodoo:
Um, phoodoo — in my scenario I always get the flavor I choose, whether that turns out to be chocolate or vanilla. There are no false promises. It’s the opposite of your carburetor scenario.
Read it again:
About that “complex thinking” business…
I see phoodoo has moved into desperation mode and is drooling self-serving caricatures of our exchanges onto the board because he’s got no actual good responses to offer.
Take for example this:
phoodoo: You think that if something can’t be completely known and understood in this lifetime, then it can’t be real.
Rumraket: No, not at all. Obviously there are many things that will be found out by future generations long after I’m gone. Things that have real answers that we don’t currently know or understand. And for many past generations there were people who lived and died without knowing things that later generations found out. Sorry man but what you’re saying is obviously false.
phoodoo: The faith of the skeptical can never be underestimated. Materialism will win one day, please pretty please…
It’s hilarious. Me correcting phoodoo that I don’t, in fact, think the way he attributes to me, is now me somehow making some materialist faith statement begging for a “win”. Even his use of the word “win” is revealing here. It’s about “winning” to phoodoo. About personal emotional investment and pride. Oh if only he could win, he would so very much like to show us.
It’s obvious that phoodoo responds like he does because he’s got no sensible answer to my last post. He suffers a complete poverty of arguments or critical thinking and has been reduced to outbusts of emotional-laden caricatures. He’s spelling out how he would like the exchanges to look, what would make him feel good. Not what actually happens. It’s a form of make-believe. By posting his self-serving caricature, he succeeded only in making himself feel good.
keiths,
There was no choice. You can’t have a physical state which aligns with two outcomes. .
You always choose the carburetor, you just don’t realize it.
There was choice, it’s just that you always choose what’s in your nature to choose. That given some situation, you will want to respond to it in a certain way. That’s your nature, your personality, your desires. You receive some input, and your nature is to respond to that input according to your nature. So given the exact same situation, with both the input and your nature unaltered, you’d produce the same reaction.
The alternative where you some times pick one thing and some times, if the tape was re-run (with no changes to your nature, or your surroundings) you’d still pick something else, makes no sense at all. That’s tantamount to saying you don’t have a nature, that it just happens for no reason. Or that your nature is fundamentally stochastic and can randomly change for no reason. Some times you pick chocolate, some times you pick strawberry, some times you vomit on it and put it back in your mouth. Who knows why?
It just happens, that’s all. For occult reasons.
I’m enjoying these mixed metaphors, Grasshopper of Middle Earth. Keep ’em coming!
What if its in your nature to be indecisive?
Rumraket doesn’t have even the slightest clue what he means by your nature.
If you are a materialist, all your nature means is that this is where the atoms are at this second, and nothing”you” can do can change where the atoms are. Its like saying an atom has a choice, it can choose chocolate or vanilla depending on its nature. Light can choose to go up or down depending on its nature. A bucket of paint can choose to be blue or red, depending on its nature. Just because it chose blue doesn’t mean it couldn’t have chosen red. It had many alternatives. Just like keiths and Rummy choose.
The question answers itself. Then you have difficulty picking what you want, either because you want nothing in particular, or you want everything about equally.
I know exactly what I mean by it. I mean the same thing as I do when I say my computer has a nature. My computer can output all sorts of behaviors, depending on the inputs. It has a programming, which you could call it’s nature, and it will produce a certain behavior in response to certain inputs.
There’s no reason to think human beings are all that different in this respect. The more alike we are genetically and in our experiences, the more likely it becomes we also make the same choices and act the same way. Identical twins who live and grow up together will frequently finish each other’s sentences or give idential answers to questions, even speak in synchronization.
Oddly enough you seem to be suggesting that there is no such thing as someone’s nature. That things just happen for no reason, and nothing is really the cause of why you do the things you do. It could change for some fundamentally inscrutable reason and it can never be known if there even is one. One day you might randomly for occult reasons decide to stab your wife to death because, well, who knows why? Given enough re-runs of the tape, it just happens, that’s all!
You choose Neapolitan ice cream.
Can a computer be indecisive?
Yes, there are circumstances under which a computer will take a very long time to pick a course of action, or even enter into an infinite loop until something happens to bring it out of it.
Do you ever play any games? Indecisive AI behavior comes up frequently in games. It happens often in games where an AI opponents gets stuck in some loop of evaluations. Programmers often times have to specifically prevent those states, such that after some X number of cycles have passed with nothing happening, a specific course of action is coded.