Folks who believe in an immaterial soul (also known as ‘substance dualists’) face a daunting challenge. Why, if our mental and emotional functions are carried out by the immaterial soul, are they so completely affected by changes to the physical brain?
A common dualist response to this challenge is what I call the ‘brain as radio receiver’ model. In this model, the brain is something like a radio receiver, with the soul as the transmitter. The brain is constantly picking up signals from the soul and converting them into nervous impulses that are passed on to the rest of the brain and the body. When the brain is damaged or temporarily impaired, say by drinking, then the signals are no longer received clearly. The transmission isn’t affected, but the reception is.
This is a woefully inadequate model, for reasons that I’m sure we’ll discuss thoroughly in the comments. However, it’s understandable why someone who wants the soul to exist (particularly for religious reasons) would be attracted to it. What’s surprising is that David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who should know better, sees value in the model. At the end of his book Incognito, he writes the following:
As an example, I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. The same goes for the red wire. Yanking out the black wire causes the voices to get garbled, and removing the yellow wire reduces the volume to a whisper. You step carefully through all the combinations, and you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. Change the circuitry and you damage the voices.
Proud of your new discoveries, you devote your life to developing a science of the way in which certain configurations of wires create the existence of magical voices. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don’t know — but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.
Your conclusions are limited by the fact that you know absolutely nothing about radio waves and, more generally, electromagnetic radiation. The fact that there are structures in distant cities called radio towers — which send signals by perturbing invisible waves that travel at the speed of light — is so foreign to you that you could not even dream it up. You can’t taste radio waves, you can’t see them, you can’t smell them, and you don’t yet have any pressing reason to be creative enough to fantasize about them. And if you did dream of invisible radio waves that carry voices, who could you convince of your hypothesis? You have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them.
So you would become a radio materialist. You would conclude that somehow the right configuration of wires engenders classical music and intelligent conversation. You would not realize that you’re missing an enormous piece of the puzzle.
I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio — that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so — but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out.
Eagleman is wrong about that. The ‘brain as radio receiver’ model isn’t scientifically viable. In the comments, let’s discuss all the reasons why. Any intrepid dualists who would like to defend the model are also welcome to participate, of course.
keiths,
I agree with you–I just don’t see it being a particular problem for radio the broadcast analogy. It seems to me to be a problem with substance dualism generally.
Mike,
Among substance dualists, the favored “explanation” these days seems to be that no physical laws are violated, but that the mind/soul influences wavefunction collapse within the brain so that desired outcomes are achieved.
Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff think this is accomplished via neuronal microtubules, but most neuroscientists roll their eyes at that.
First clarify what the transmitter does and what the receiver does.
My layman’s impression it that the mind is presented as the true self, and the brain is analogous to a sensor array and possibly storage.
But if you assign all memory to the brain, you pretty much assign the self to the brain.
Perhaps an analogy with a real, ongoing radio problem would help convey my quandry.
I live in a broadcast hole. I can’t get reliable broadcast TV reception. It is not signal strength, because I get the maximum signal as indicated by the signal meter. What I get is intermittent moments when the strength drops to zero. these dips occur maybe once a minute or so and last for a couple seconds.
My point is that the radio receiver (television being a subset of radio broadcasting) knows that something is wrong with the transmission or with the signal. It can recognize and diagnose the problem. And it can behave normally with respect to its internal signal sources and local signal sources.
What I don’t understand about dualism is why the true, non-physical self, does not recognize and diagnose signal problems. Why doesn’t the true self notice that the brain is damaged or inebriated? If the mind is separate from the body, why is judgement impaired when the body is impaired?
I simply don’t see anything that the mind does that isn’t what the brain does.
walto,
It’s still a problem for the radio model itself. If the soul has no functions, what’s left for it to “broadcast”?
Again, I don’t know the answer to that question, keith. I assume the dualist would answer something like “consciousness.” What that would mean, exactly, I don’t know.
Looking back at the OP, I get the impression that in the radio analogy, the brain is the receiver and the mind is the transmitter.
That makes less sense than the other way round. None of it makes any sense.
It’s not even wrong. It can’t be wrong or right, because it’s completely incoherent.
walto,
If by ‘consciousness’ you mean subjective awareness, then there is no need for the soul to “broadcast” it. It just experiences it.
In fact, in that case the standard radio model would be reversed. The information would be “transmitted” from the body to the soul, never in the other direction.
Those notions are quantum woo-woo. Nobody who is working in these areas and actually doing measurements believes that.
Quantum coherence effects are measured at temperatures below liquid helium temperatures (about 4 Kelvin). There are no such “wave functions” to be collapsed at room temperature.
Quantum mechanics applies to the various types of bonds among the atoms the make up organic compounds. However, quantum coherence is not something that extends over the dimensions of the molecules of living organisms; let alone over the distances of neural networks.
petrushka,
I addressed that in one of my comments:
petrushka:
It’s at least coherent if you make it a two-way radio, but the scientific evidence is still against it.
I think keith made the point that interactionism would require an analogue to a two-way radio. I think what what “ensouling” has lately been claimed to do, is distinguish people from zombies. Not sure that alleged function works very well with the radio picture, though.
[edit–I see keith makes a similar point above.]
Without the broadcast, would the radio play tuneless songs? 😉
keiths,
Right. I think this is actually the best argument against the radio analogy. Thanks.
A two way radio implies two agents transmitting and receiving.
When I say the analogy is incoherent, I do not men there is no way to rationalize it. There’s always a way to make magic logically coherent.
What I mean is that you have created an additional entity that has no function and is not necessary. If one wishes to argue that it is necessary, then someone please explain what it does.
petrushka,
‘Incoherent’ and ‘unparsimonious’ are two different things.
I don’t see how you can have scientific evidence for or against something that has no entailments.
It’s like arguing against a magic designer that can change reality including all the forward and reverse temporal references.
In fact, the whole thing can be mapped to a design argument.
I wanted to backtrack on my claim of incoherence because magic cannot be incoherent. There’s always a wave of the wand that can add or modify an inconsistent feature.
One can, like William, simply assert that matter/non-matter interaction is possible, and poof, no problem. Since it is all made-up, it can have any attributes required.
What I would like to see is a dualism that has entailments.
Mike,
That’s actually not true. From Nature Physics:
I think Penrose and Hameroff’s ideas are wrong, but it’s not because coherence is impossible at room temperature.
petrushka,
It does have entailments, as I argued above:
Penrose and Hameroff have not thrown in the towel yet; in Jan 2014 they claimed that observed quantum variations in microtubules corroborate their ideas.
I don’t think they would consider their theory dualist, although perhaps Penrose’s Platonic bent could be called that.
Bruce,
Yes, and Penrose certainly isn’t a dualist of Plantinga’s stripe, but he does seem to believe that pure physics, uninformed by Something Outside, can’t explain things like our ability to determine the truth of Gödelian statements.
Your version has entailments, but the magic version will wave away problems.
What I want is a version promoted by a believer in dualism that has testable entailments.
Yes, that was my understanding too, although I think he would say he was just improving physics by showing how quantum collapse works and then using that to explain how brains could go beyond Turing computation. Maybe. It was a long, long time since I read his stuff so that’s based on Wiki.
I also don’t think they say it violates conservation of energy, but I’m not sure about that.
In any event, I’m still not clear on how being able to collapse a wave function to one of the consistent macro-world states helps with conservation of energy, since there still needs to be the sequence of neurochemical states in the brain that conserve energy at measurable levels, as Mike pointed out. Is this addressed anywhere in any detail in quantum woo?
I don’t think either dualism or non-dualism has testable entailments. How could one devise an empirical test for the truth of physicalism?
I think your earlier parsimony point is the important one here. If you don’t need immaterial substances, you don’t include them in your ontology.
petrushka,
The dualist can’t wave away those problems without admitting, for example, that the soul is not responsible for our decisions.
They generally aren’t willing to make the necessary concessions, so they are stuck defending a model much like the one I presented.
We already have. Numerous examples have been cited on this thread. There are no attributes of a person or a person’s self that cannot be altered or obliterated by brain damage or brain manipulation.
I’ve asked for an example that is contrary to this assertion and have received none.
Going back to the OP and the radio found by people who have no knowledge of broadcasting. I’ve already said this, but I will try to say it again again in different words. The example paints a false picture of what science does.
there are, of course, problems which, at any given time, are beyond the scope of science. Origin of life is one. Consciousness is another.
But parodies of scientific method add no light to hard problems. Nor is it helpful to point out individual scientists who talk over their heads. People and institutions are fallible. The interesting question would be, what can non-empirical methods add, if anything.
Like you, I haven’t read him for a long time, but I think I remember him arguing that this extension to physics somehow gives us access to a genuinely real, Platonic domain of nonphysical mathematical truths.
The idea is that none of the collapsed states violate the conservation of energy, so nudging the collapse toward one final state versus another (via some non-energetic, heretofore undiscovered mechanism) would not violate it either.
petrushka,
I don’t think Eagleman is urging the use of ‘non-empirical methods’. He’s warning against hubris, which is sensible, but then he asserts that the radio model is scientifically viable, which is not sensible.
No doubt also access to Platonic errors. Or Has Penrose never had to discard a brainstorm idea that turned out to be rubbish?
That’s when the radio goes on the fritz. 🙂
ETA: That’s “on the blink” for you Brits.
petrushka,
I don’t see those as tests for the truth of physicalism. For example, Spinoza believed there were an infinite number of what he called “Attributes” (besides Thought and Extension) that he basically believed to be unknowable by human beings. It seems to me one simply can’t, by definition, devise a test to prove that something is all there is. But it’s not the physicalist’s burden to prove that kind of negative, so it makes no difference. The burden is on anybody who says there’s something else, and as you indicate, it’s a very difficult burden to lift.
I will only say that there’s some history here, and that history does not favor finding support for extra-physical entities.
As always, I’m probably missing most of this but it seems to boil down to:
1) If the mind is something independent of brain operation, to DO anything it would have to be of measurable magnitude. It’s not measurable.
2) Mind as a side-effect of what brains do for a living fits everything we know, and everything that would be required. No additional entities add anything.
3) As far as I can tell, duelists are not motivated by either neurological mysteries or physical limitations. Rather, they are motivated by the doctrinal necessity to find what’s not there. The indetectable and the nonexistent are frustratingly similar.
And BruceS:
One needs to be very careful about taking any of these examples as evidence for quantum mechanical coherence. Many classical systems also “ring” in one or more modes with very high Qs after being hit with an impulse. Other cascade effects don’t require quantum coherence.
In the detection of photons, there is bound to be a transition region between quantum mechanical phenomena and classical behavior; that is true of any photonic system. But that doesn’t mean quantum coherence persists on scales larger than few hundredths of a nanometer in systems at room temperature.
By the way; the so-called “high temperature” superconductors work at something like 135 Kelvin, and there is ongoing research to try to push those temperatures higher. However, those systems are 2-D ceramic compounds; nothing like the squishy systems found in living organisms. The early work on “organic superconductors” is finding transition temperatures down around 11 Kelvin; a long way from room temperature.
I have worked in both the areas of superconductivity and photonic devices. It would be “unscientific” for me as a scientist to proclaim that quantum coherence is “impossible” in room temperature organic systems in living organisms; but a certain robust skepticism is definitely warranted.
However, refusal to say “impossible” doesn’t mean that any kind of wild speculation is to be given serious weight by non-specialists looking on. Such speculation lies on the creative edge of theoretical physics; but experimental verification is where the rubber hits the road.
Mike,
The Nature Physics paper is definitely about quantum coherence. That’s why it was such big news when it was published.
I didn’t purchase the paper. Over what lengths is this “quantum”
coherence taking place?
What the …?
I managed to download a PDF file from here.
Good thread and it hits it on the head.
If we are immaterial souls then why is out thinking affected by interference from the material world.??
This by being babies(so growth in thinking) old age, autism, retardation, depressions, phobias, and drink/drugs/tiredness.
I know the answer, SAid it here before.
Its a simple, even apparent, answer.
our soul is just meshed to our memory. tHe memory is a greater bigger part of the brain then has been imagined. in fact it might be 97% etc.
In fact our mind is possibly just a top level of organized memory facts.
Our soul does all the thinking but uses the mind/memory as a tool.
Therefore interference with the memory explains all problems with thinking.
Yet its not the memory that is failing but the triggering mechanism for the memory.
Example. When one gets a song stuck in ones head one has just witnessed the memory being interfered with and forcing intruding thoughts and so reactions.
Being drunk does not affect the brain juices or wiring or memory. it just affects the triggering mechanism for the memory.
Its a hint that all mental problems could be healed by drugs etc.
Anyways there is no evidence our brains do anything without our free will unless its a issue that can be defined as a memory issue.
We have a great big search engine on our shoulders with a hidden soul working it. However the engine breaks down a wee bit or a wee bit more
But it is not what you seem to think it is.
Note that this paper is discussing effects that occur on femtosecond time scales and 15 angstrom inter-chromophore separations in photosynthetic biological detectors.
It is an interesting paper because they are modeling quantum entanglement in the extraction and transmission of photon energy by light sensitive molecules. They are modeling that “crossover region” between the quantum mechanical photon and the decoherence of a pure quantum state due to quantum mechanical entanglement with the environment of a cluster of molecules with average separations of about 15 angstroms. That decoherence takes place over timescales on the order of a few hundred femtoseconds. It’s the transition from a quantum state to its classical manifestation in a “detector.”
These time and distance scales are within the ranges of experimental exploration with current laser technology; so the calculations provide a model for comparison against experimental testing. These chromophores are molecules that have particular kinds of bonds and configurations that make them more efficient at extracting the energy in the quantum state of a photon. Most other molecular configurations are not as efficient.
I would suggest that the paper is very consistent with what I have just been saying about the nature of quantum coherence. I see no surprises here because I already have direct experience with studying quantum coherence in coupled networks of superconducting systems as well as photonic systems used to convert photon energy to other forms. The time and distance scales here are far below those of the signals that take place within the nervous systems of living organisms; as I already pointed out.
Living systems will most likely be explained with classical physics and chemistry even though photonic detection is a quantum-state-to-classical-state entanglement transition that takes place on much smaller time and distance scales.
This paper has nothing to do with “quantum coherence” as an explanation for consciousness?”
If one wants to get some ballpark estimates of deBroglie wavelengths for molecules, one can use the formula λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant (6.63 x 10^(-34) J s) and p is the momentum of a particle.
But p = sqrt(2m E), and the thermal energy, E, of a molecule of mass m is on the order of kT, where k is Boltzmann’s constant (1.38 x 10^(-23) J/K) and T is the temperature in Kelvin.
Let’s work in units of proton mass. Let a be the number of protons in a molecule and m be the mass of the proton (1.67 x 10^(-27) kg).
Thus we get λ = h/sqrt(2 a m k T). Plugging in the fixed quantities, we get λ = (3.08 x 10^(-9))/sqrt(a T) in units of meters; or, if you like λ = 3.08/sqrt(a T) in units of nanometers. That 3.08 nanometers sets an upper limit on deBroglie wavelength when a and T are both 1.
This is just a back-of-the-envelope type of calculation that demonstrates what one is up against in proposing “quantum coherence” as an explanation of consciousness.
keiths:
Mike:
Sure it is.
You were under the impression that
That’s not correct, and I offered the Nature Physics paper as a striking counterexample.
You learned something today, Mike. 🙂
P.S. That isn’t a one-off study, either. See this one, too.
Robert Byers:
If the brain is the site of memory, then memory vanishes when we die. Are you comfortable with that idea? You’re a Christian, if I remember correctly, but I don’t know your specific views on the afterlife.
I have no idea of what you are trying to assert here, but it appears you didn’t read, let alone comprehend, any of those papers or anything I have said.
What quantum wave function do you think exists in the neural networks of living systems at room temperature; and why? What kind of quantum coherence lengths are you talking about in biological systems at room temperature?
Mike,
Take it easy, Mike. I’ve already explained what I’m asserting:
Regarding the second part of your comment, why are you asking me about wave functions in neural networks? I’ve made it clear that I am not defending Penrose and Hameroff:
And:
Here is one for you then, if you enjoy reading this borderline science. It is the paper I indirectly referenced earlier in which Hameroff describes the latest update of the theory.
Review of Orch OR Theory
That update was prompted by recent claims about “quantum vibrations” made by Anirban Bandyopadhyay. His work is reference 88 and 89 in the long (and eclectic) list of references to Hameroffs paper at the link. I also located this critical review of Bandyopadhyay’s claims.
New Results about Microtubules as Quantum Systems
All of these technical papers quickly go beyond my pay grade. The bit that fascinates me is the role of Penrose in all of this.
There are many situations where a first-rate scientist in one field pushes crackpot theories in another field. But Penrose is a world class mathematical physicist, and he is pushing at least four borderline theories in his area of expertise: a generally discredited view of what Godel’s results mean for human intelligence, a unique theory of quantum collapse and gravity, a platonic universe at the Planck scale, and quantum effects in microtubules. Not to say anything of his rejection of standard cosmological inflation in favor of his own alternative view of the Big Bang.
Flint said:
I would say that one of the measurable effects of mind is its capacity to trivially produce, on the spot, virtually infinite amounts of complex, specified information.
Depends on who the “we” is that you are referring to, and how you define “know”. For example, mind as a side-effect of brains doesn’t explain Pam Reynolds’ experiences she had while clinically brain dead. Mind as side-effect of brain doesn’t explain various research conducted since the late 1900’s into mediumship and other paranormal phenomena, including NDE’s, nonlocal, apparently disembodied intelligences and research into reincarnation.
However, if you exclude from “we” everyone who disagrees with you, and define “know” as only those conclusions accepted by the current scientific establishment consensus here in the west, then I suppose such a statement (properly contextualized) can be considered by some to be correct.
And many dualists think the opposite – that materialists are have an ideological need to ignore and deny what is plainly there, and to organize data in a way that fits their admitted a priori bias towards materialism. As Lewontin said,
Where the a priori bias lies is obvious.
I’ll plead guilty as charged to that one, with the limitation of “know” to areas of competence for science (ie where scientists work). Luckily, I grew up a little too late to be a hippie, so “establishment” is not a dirty word for me.
I don’t think “the west” is a apt anymore, however. There are many great scientists from (eg) India, China, and Japan, and the improvements of the lives for their people in the last 50 years or so is partly due to the acceptance and application of science there.
Of course, that is an establishment of what an improved life means, I suppose.
Really. Show your math.
BruceS,
I’m not saying other countries don’t have science or great scientists; I’m saying that countries outside of the west do not entirely share it’s materialist bias.
I think there are non-materialist philosophers from all over the world who have many profound things to say about the first-person perspective of human experience. I see this as similar to how great literature contributes to our lives.
Science applies to the third person perspective (this is a rough division, of course).
I agree that where to draw the line is a not a settled point, especially for understanding the relationship of mind and brain.
But I’m with pushing science as far as it will take us; further, I doubt non-scientific approaches which claim consequences or which rely on explanations which contradict well-established science.
ETA: In short, I don’t think you should characterize knowledge geographically.