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?
Donkeys and mules are renowned for refusing to move forward when we want them to, not because of indecisiveness but the opposite. They make a firm decision that they don’t want to move.
If you want to continue to anthropomorphise computers, I am equally entitled to mulemorphise them. Very decisive and stubborn with it 🙂
(I never play computer games.)
And it melts before you can decide which flavour to start on 🙂
CharlieM,
Yes, if it’s programmed that way.
An indecisive computer can be built with decisive logic gates, just as an indecisive brain can be built with decisive neurons.
Don’t fall for the fallacy of composition, as phoodoo does:
Atoms don’t make choices, but systems built from them do.
You can only get away with this analogy by not analyzing what we label as indecisiveness more closely.
I don’t think anyone ever really avoids making decisions when we describe their behavior as being indecisive, rather they are either deciding not to pick options offered to them (as in walking away, or deciding to ignore calls for to make a choice, what you call being stubborn), or going through a loop of rationalizations and evaluations that prevents them from progressing to actually making a pick. Indecisiveness is just a label for variations of this kind of behavior.
phoodoo,
You keep assuming dualism without realizing it. There is no you separate from the atoms that you are composed of. There is no separate you that can’t control your physical state.
This is just the fallacy of composition, as explained above.
Paint doesn’t make decisions at all, much less about what color of light it reflects.
What is this you thing, and why is an incorporeal entity obsessed with ice cream flavors?
Would the incorporeal entity have different food preferences if its body had been raised in a different culture?
keiths,
Oh do I?
Haha. Sort of like you, if you are programmed that way?
If your system of atoms that chooses is in the state which chooses chocolate, can it choose vanilla?
What does a system of atoms base its food preferences on? Can the system of atoms change its preference? Can it choose something it doesn’t prefer?
Keiths is trapped on a boat that is sinking and he can’t swim. Do you have a life jacket for him?
phoodoo,
You’re doing it again. It’s not “my system of atoms” we’re talking about; it’s me. They aren’t separate.
And it’s not the state that does the choosing. I do, by proceeding through a sequence of states. If I am choosing chocolate, then I am not choosing vanilla, but that doesn’t mean there was no choice to make in the first place.
I considered both alternatives and picked the one I like better — chocolate. Two options were available to me, and I picked one. I chose.
You are a system of atoms, according to you, right?
So this thing you call a system of atoms, it has to be in one state to choose chocolate right? There can’t be a state which chooses both chocolate and vanilla can there?
I mean, I get it, you are trying to obfuscate by saying nonsense things like “you do this by proceeding through a sequence of states.” “You” being the system of atoms and all. So the system of atoms proceeds through a sequence of states, and can it decide not to proceed through that sequence of states-this system? Or does the state which decides to go through the sequence of states to get to where it is deciding have the option of not going through the sequence of states, thus not deciding?
In that case, can’t there only be ONE sequence of states which decides to go through the sequence of states which decides, because again we are lost in your conundrum of how one state can make two choices?
phoodoo,
What does an immaterial mind base its food preferences on? Can the immaterial mind change its preference? Can it choose something it doesn’t prefer?
You keep thinking that the issue is physicalism vs immaterialism, but it’s not. It’s compatibilism vs libertarian free will, and the latter is incoherent even if the mind is immaterial.
keiths,
Wrong. The issue is how does a system which matches one state with one outcome, produced one state with two outcomes, or five …?
It’s your conundrum, so obviously you would prefer to pretend there is another conundrum so you don’t have to address that one.
One state =chocolate.
Other state =vanilla.
You can’t get from there to one state equals either vanilla or chocolate or neither or both.
Your life jacket hasn’t arrived.
phoodoo,
These are the issues that keep coming up for you:
1. You keep inadvertently assuming your conclusion — the truth of dualism.
2. You can’t conceive of how a predetermined choice nevertheless remains a choice.
3. You think the issue is physicalism vs immaterialism, when it’s really compatibilism vs libertarian free will.
You really need to work on those.
keiths,
One state =chocolate.
Other state =vanilla.
Has nothing to do with pre-determinsim. Simple math. One does not equal two.
One does not equal a choice.
phoodoo,
Twenty people attend an ice cream social. Twenty people are offered a choice between chocolate and vanilla. Some choose chocolate and receive chocolate. The others choose vanilla and receive vanilla. Twenty people make a choice, and each gets the flavor he or she chooses.
Nineteen people are happy — each of them got the flavor they preferred, after all. The twentieth — phoodoo — is unhappy. “I didn’t get a choice of ice cream flavors,” he complains.
Twenty people attend an ice cream social. Twenty people are offered a choice between chocolate and vanilla. Some (have a system of atoms that is in the state that chooses chocolate) and they say chocolate and receive chocolate. The others (have the system of atoms that is in the state that chooses vanilla) and they vanilla and receive vanilla. Twenty people (believe) they make a choice, and each gets the flavor he or she chooses.
Belief is not reality if one is a materialist. In fact reality is not reality if one is a materialist apparently.
One state = ones outcome.
Are you going to try to argue for one state having two outcomes?
It seems to me that’s precisely what you are doing. There is one physical state, I think we all agree on that. And yet from that state you can make multiple “decisions”? But cannot say how or why?
How are decisions made in phoodoo world? Does causality not apply? Does the past not affect the future?
Are there any other people who have the same position as you but have stated it more formally? Are there any books, research papers or whatever that you agree with with regards to choice? Does your position have a formal name?
If not, suggest you put it out there. See how you get on.
If there is both chocolate and vanilla, then there are two options, and if there’s more than one option then there is choice. You have the choice to pick what you want, what is in your nature to pick.
The fact that some always pick vanilla, and others always pick chocolate, does not mean there isnt’ choice, it just means they pick what’s in their nature to pick.
And they can pick the one they want, and they will do so. So there is choice, even if they will only ever pick one thing given the same situation.
Yes, they choose what is in their nature to choose. Chocolate is their pick, that’s what they want. It’s in their programming to pick chocolate, not vanilla. If they had the nature to pick vanilla over chocolate, they’d have done so. The fact that it isn’t their nature doesn’t mean it’s not a decision.
And they do make a choice. The choice that they want. The choice that is their nature to make.
True, belief is not reality. It’s belief. It may be mistaken, or it may be correct, but mere belief is not automatically reality.
But on supernaturalism, everything is make-believe. If you just wish for it hard enough, it will happen. Shut your eyes, grind your teeth, focus intensely and WISH AS HARD AS YOU CAN, and suddenly all of reality will alter before your amazing occult powers of magical wishes. People can come back from the dead, cure diseases and ailments by diluting water, and gold can be found at the end of the rainbow. Also you don’t really die, because an even greater magical wisher than you, who loves you and wished everything into existence, will give you a new life after your personality magically survives your death.
All this and more can be yours for the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties.
This is not an indecisive act on the part of the computer. Say the computer is programmed to either follow path A or path B or to remain in a loop which takes neither path. This is not indecisiveness between two choices, it is making a definite selection between three choices, continue on path A, continue on path B or remain in loop.
A man may sit at a junction because he cannot make a decision as to which road to take. A computer does not have this problem, it “decides” on a course of action and sticks to it without any thoughts about where the alternate paths lead. It is just doing what it was programmed to do. It does not procrastinate through indecision.
And brains don’t make anticipatory choices, people do.
People without brains don’t do anything at all, on the other hand.
Do you believe in ghosts?
So the group of letters “indecisiveness” is a label or a representation used to stand for a particular process or thing that comes into our mind. These labels are not the things or processes themselves but symbols which we need to agree on in order to understand each other. Does a computer work in the same way? Does it “understand” that a certain arrangement of ones and zeros (voltage differences) stands for something other than ones and zeros?
A person can be indecisive about choosing a particular flavour of ice cream or even deciding to do without any. Can a computer really be indecisive about which arrangement of ones and zeros it will let determine its future path? All a computer can do is manipulate ones and zeros, it cannot get outside of these. Desire is not something we can attribute to computers. Unlike a human it cannot let the anticipation of future pleasure dictate its actions.
For the first few weeks after you were conceived you had no brain but you were doing a great deal.
No.
You believe minds can exist apart from brains?
Making choices was I?
Keiths and Rumraket don’t seem to know what a computer is.
Amusing.
Yes
Depends if you are talking about conscious or unconscious choices.
What’s that if not a ghost?
What choices are made, either unconscious or otherwise?
If I program a computer to seem like it desires electricity what test will you apply such that you can determine that it is only emulating such a desire?
What happens if you then apply that test to a human being?
In other words, we’re back to phoodoo can’t tell us when Jesus puts the soul in things.
My heavens, you are so far from coming to grips with the problem. It almost feels you must be joking, you can’t possibly be so unable to grasp the issue, can you?
It doesn’t matter how many choices you believe exist, what matters is if this physical system is capable of doing anything other than what the specific state of atoms is doing at any specific place and time. If the atoms arrangement within this system is such that it will pick vanilla, then chocolate existing is irrelevant. the atoms can’t pick chocolate when they are in a vanilla arrangement, right? So chocolate isn’t really a choice now is it? At that exact moment, with those exact atoms that make you you, if you really believe all of life is just material atoms in a system, then the atoms just do what they do when they are where they are-just like a computer only does what it does when the 1 and 0’s switch on and off.
First try to understand what computers do Rummy-not what it looks like to fascinated little infants what it is doing. Then try to figure out what a material brain could be capable of doing, without invoking any emergence or consciousness magic-and then maybe you can get closer to the issue.
I reiterate, no one in their right mind really believes this materialist nonsense, not you, not keiths, not anyone. That is why you are fighting to inject non-material aspects into the material, like choice, nature, preference, etc…
Those aspect don’t exist to atoms and chemicals. That’s why the two of you can’t swallow your own theory.
It still required a person with a brain for me to do anything.
Just curious, did the immaterial mind exist already?
If only there was someone able to describe how it actually works in the dualistic world.
Does coming to grips with a problem mean understanding everything, and what would that even mean?
I think this is the wrong way of looking at the situation. It is certainly true that there’s nothing at the level of binary sequences (let alone voltage differences) that indicates what those sequences represent. But by the same reasoning, there’s nothing at the level of action potentials and synaptic transmissions that indicates what those neuronal assemblies represent.
When neuroscientists talk about representations in the brain, they don’t locate those representations at the level of action potentials and synaptic transmissions; they locate representations at the level of the structure of neuronal assemblies of hundreds of thousands of neurons operating in ways that can be modeled using complexity theory.
Well, yes and no. John Haugeland, a well-respected philosopher of mind and cognitive science, put it this way: the problem with computers is that they don’t give a damn. Computers can’t care or be concerned, and they can’t want, because at the end of the day they don’t have any needs, and a computer has no needs because it is not alive.
So while it is true that computers can’t care, need, and want, and animals (including ourselves) do, it’s not because voltage differences in microchips and action potentials in brains are somehow magically different — it’s that biological computation is in the service of maintaining allostasis, and non-biological computation is not.
This seems to be the fundamental complaint of the materialist, but its a bogus complaint. The immaterialist readily admits we can’t know all about the supernatural world. Its the same complaint they make about God-they say well show me the God, put it in my hands, then I can believe-without being able to accept the notion that the closest you can come to evidence of the supernatural is evidence through your own conscious perceptions of life. Its insane asking for more than this.
But the materialist, unfortunately for them, doesn’t get to say it can’t be known because its from another realm. Instead they claim it all can be known, because it is all in front of us. But then when we say, well then why can’t you show us, they say, well, why can’t you? Its nonsense. We have already told you why. So what’s your excuse.
You have none, other than, well, one day one day, we have faith, faith..skeptic faith.
I have often asked here, what would be evidence for a God. And true to form, people like Rumraket will admit that no evidence would work, because after all, if it looks like a God and sounds like a God, and spells out God in the sky, you will still say, well, we just haven’t figured it out yet, that doesn’t mean it is God.
So you say you want evidence, you want explanations, but that’s a ruse. You don’t really want evidence . You have plenty of evidence. But every time you get more, you just say, well, its just not explained yet, but we will. Its not mystical, its…well, don’t worry its not.
But this is programming, supplied by evolution. We have systems, such as self driving cars and floor cleaning robots, that attempt to maintain allostasis. The difference is degree of complexity and ability to learn.
As I see it a ghost is supposed to reveal itself by making some sort of impression on our normal senses, such as a diaphanous like image located in space. Some people may claim they have seen a ghost but I would say there is always another explanation.
IMO physical substance is the product of mind. Mind is primal (In the beginning was the word). The thinking mind belongs to a higher level of reality the world of the senses a lower level of reality. The physical world is a product of this higher reality.
From New Scientist
As far as I know deciding involves making a choice.
IMO yes of sorts. But we need to experience physical existence in order to develop egos which are relatively independent. Without this existence we would not attain self-consciousness. Without a nervous system and senses we would not be able to make the distinction between ourselves and the world around us. Physical life is a temporary but necessary stage in our development. We are and always have been within the higher reality, but our present awareness is limited to one small part of it.
newton:
phoodoo:
Who said anything about “knowing all”? We’d be surprised if you could tell us anything about how the immaterial mind makes decisions.
keiths:
CharlieM:
You’re confusing decisiveness at the instruction level with decisiveness at the program level.
Again, that’s the fallacy of composition. A system can have characteristics that its parts do not have.
phoodoo,
You’re confused again.
Decisions can be affected by the available alternatives (including the unchosen ones) even if physicalism and determinism are true.
Simple example:
I’m in a particular state at this instant. Give me a choice between a) vanilla, and b) chocolate, and I will choose chocolate, not vanilla.
Now “rewind the tape” so I’m in exactly the same state as before. Give me a choice between a) vanilla, and b) having my fingernails pulled out one by one, and I will choose vanilla.
I’m in the same exact physical state, but this time I choose vanilla after rejecting it before. It depends on the alternatives being offered to me. They are not irrelevant.
I am making a real choice, even if the outcome is inevitable given my current state.
phoodoo,
Fallacy of composition.
You are now claiming the exact same physical state can produce different results.
So, you are now saying its not the physical state which makes a choice, its something else. That’s funny-same state many outcomes. I knew you didn’t really believe in materialism.
You seem to know there is an immaterial self making decisions, somehow attached to a material body, somehow causing from its “different realm” physical effects in the body when it chooses to, able to translate physical sensory information into the immaterial realm.
We observe that physical elements such as sleep deprivation, drugs ,and diseases can affect the decision making in people, why would material processes affect the immaterial self?
Just no way to know?
You realize God could exist and we could still not have an immaterial self.It just depends on which version of the deity you believe in.
Let’s just keep it simple and just focus on how we ( immaterial self ) choose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. And how can we test and define the realm the “immaterial homunculus”.
phoodoo,
Of course it can. Future states depend on more than just the current state of the system — they also depend on the inputs from the environment. Isn’t that obvious?
Take a person in a given state. Then either shake that person’s hand or slap them across the face. Do you think you’ll see the same future behavior in both cases?
phoodoo,
I’ve been telling you the entire time that states don’t make choices, but people, who are physical systems, do. And they do so by proceeding through a sequence of states — a sequence that will differ depending on a) their current state and b) the inputs from the environment.
And (b) is why you were wrong to say that the unchosen alternatives are irrelevant to the choice.