People can certainly derive help from their relationship with a psychiatrist but that is an entirely different matter from saying that the science is sound. As science buckles under the strain of trying to be a secular religion, it pays to get things like this straight.
Mind
Philosopher: Morality is merely community norms
Why is it that the people most likely to be attracted to this sort of naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” also appear to be full of rage against what they perceive to be injustice, smashing stuff and people? And none of their theories about how they’ll make anything better sound very convincing.
J. P. Moreland: Anxiety and depression are largely habit
Moreland: If you are suffering from anxiety and depression, I want you to know that you can change. I want you to have hope because there are things you can do to get better.
Researcher: “Environmental crisis” spurs some scientists to believe plants are conscious
He worries that their concern is “clouding their objectivity.” But isn’t objectivity the next two-minute hate?
Why do plant scientists need to tell the world that plants are NOT conscious?
You didn’t think plants were conscious, did you? Did you really think salad is murder? Yet telling us that plants are not conscious is the gist of a recently published major paper in Trends in Plant Science. (open access) Part of the background to the “plants think like people” movement in science, which they oppose, […]
J.P. Moreland on the reality of the mind tested by psychiatric disorder
Moreland: We are a unity of body, mind, spirit, emotions, and will and they all affect one another. And so, if my brain is damaged and it’s not producing the kinds of chemicals that it needs to help me have a good mood, then medication feels like oiling the engine or vitamins for your brain.
Researchers: Bonobos eating swamp greens help explain human brain development
Given how little substance there is to all this, they could at least have included some cute bonobo pix.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor takes on a materialist neurologist
Egnor: Novella refutes himself. He first asserts that everything he knows is an illusion. Then he insists that his illusions have slapped him in the face with reality.
At Peaceful Science: An anti-creationist psychiatrist misunderstands evidence for an immaterial mind, says Michael Egnor
In neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s view, “Here is one way of seeing it” If someone took a sledgehammer to your computer and pulverized it, yet it still worked fairly well, you would conclude that there was something rather strange about the computer that you had not previously considered: I am not arguing that fMRI imaging of […]
Is much modern psychology a “scientized version of original sin”?
But with bureaucratic efforts to mold behavior.
Researchers: Comatose people do show self-awareness
Michael Egnor: This study is consistent with the work of Wilder Penfield, who showed that higher-level abstract thought did not seem to arise from the brain in a material way.
J. P. Moreland reasons his way to evidence for the soul
To find peace, he had to think carefully about the difference between the evolutionary materialist account of the human being and what he was actually experiencing.
Logic & First Principles, 22: Is there room for fresh (hylemorphically shaped?) thinking on minds, souls and bodies?
In recent weeks, UD has been looking at the logic of being of minded intelligence, especially, embodied intelligence. One of the pivotal insights is outlined by Victor Reppert — pardon a bit of review: . . . let us suppose that brain state A [–> notice, state of a wetware, electrochemically operated computational substrate], which […]
New robotic device is controlled only by thought, no brain implant
If the mind is an illusion, how can it act directly on external things, by the force of decision-making alone?
Next! Is vivid imagination “helping explain consciousness”?
Imagine a scene in an intellectual property office where a lineup is trying to patent a theory of consciousness…