BA77 links on the consequences of mind = brain ideologies

_{kairosfocus

February 3, 2018

Amorality, Animal minds, Artificial Intelligence, Atheism, Evolutionary Incoherence, Food for thought, Humor, Lessons of History, mind and brain, rhetoric, worldview}

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While we’re on a roll on AI and its import at the hands of evolutionary materialistic scientism dressed in a lab coat, BA77 has linked a comic strip — see here (main site here; cf. twist on The Cave currently top of the heap) — that is at first funny then soberingly serious:

As in, where do you think these issues fit in:

And perhaps Engineer Derek Smith’s model has a few points to ponder as we think about the higher order, supervisory controller in the cybernetic loop:

The Derek Smith two-tier controller cybernetic model

Food for thought. END

PS: Could I put up for reflection the notion that the human soul is at the interface of spirit and body, including Brain and CNS?

Comments

OA, the design inference on functionally specific complex organisation and associated information starts with the living cell. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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MB, what people do and what they should do on warrant are categorically different things. This is one reason why subjectivism and relativism fail. Yet another form of the crooked yardstick standard. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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Jul3s, utterly irrelevant reference to Hitler. OA, We have long observation of what mechanical (including electrical/electronic) computational substrates do: process input signals and generate outputs mechanically. Perhaps, with room for noise and for butterfly effect unpredictability on which small initial differences lead to large shifts on a strange attractor. There is zero evidence of such processes acting with understanding of meaning or drawing out a rational inference from premises to conclusions. It's signal processing all the way down. Here is a useful outline on what would be implied on such a basis for reasoning:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.
That's essentially why the famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist (as well as Socialist) J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. (NB: DI Fellow, Nancy Pearcey brings this right up to date in a current book, Finding Truth.)]
At the same time, the first fact of our experience is that we are conscious and freely, commonly make rational, insightful judgements including reasoning through chains of warrant. Indeed, it is through that responsible, rational freedom that we have worked with computational substrates to design computing machines and use them: mechanical, electro-mechanical and electronic calculators, analogue computers, digital computers and neural network systems, blends of these. If we argue or imply that that self-awareness is fundamentally in error, is fundamentally a delusion floating on the wetware of our brains and associated neural networks with electrochemistry of neuronal triggering and firing, we become utterly self-referential. In effect, we would have reduced mindedness to grand, self-referential delusion. This becomes an absurdity which undermines our own rationality. It is self-falsifying and self-refuting, a reduction to absurdity. An excellent illustration is the assertions of Sir Francis Crick in his 1994 The Astonishing Hypothesis and Philip Johnson's reply in Reason in the Balance the next year. Crick:
. . . that "You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.
Philip Johnson aptly replied that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: "I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Johnson then acidly commented: “[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin. For, there is a very good reason we are cautioned about how easily self-referential statements can become self-refuting, like a snake attacking and swallowing itself tail-first. Any human scheme of thought that undermines responsible [thus, morally governed] rational freedom undermines itself fatally. We thus see inadvertent, inherent self-falsification of evolutionary materialism. But, “inadvertent” counts: it can be hard to recognise and acknowledge the logically fatal nature of the result. Of course, that subjective challenge does not change the objective result: self-referential incoherence and irretrievable self-falsification. So, we need to start afresh, on a different basis. That's why the two-tier controller approach Derek Smith raised (cf. OP) is a useful point of reference. For, here we see a cybernetic architecture that has a way for shared memory and an in the loop i/o front-end processor backed by a supervisory processor that interacts with it but is not wholly dependent on it. That can be effected in principle in many ways, but it shows that we are not locked up to an in the loop signal processing computational only view. There is room for meaning and significance, self-awareness, freedom of choice and action. Indeed, for what Plato highlighted as a self-moved, initiating cause or self. In that broad context, Harald Atmanspacher, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, observes:
It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness . . . . The original motivation in the early 20th century for relating quantum theory to consciousness was essentially philosophical. It is fairly plausible that conscious free decisions (“free will”) are problematic in a perfectly deterministic world,[1] so quantum randomness might indeed open up novel possibilities for free will. (On the other hand, randomness is problematic for volition!) Quantum theory introduced an element of randomness standing out against the previous deterministic worldview, in which randomness, if it occurred at all, simply indicated our ignorance of a more detailed description (as in statistical physics). In sharp contrast to such epistemic randomness, quantum randomness in processes such as spontaneous emission of light, radioactive decay, or other examples of state reduction was considered a fundamental feature of nature, independent of our ignorance or knowledge. To be precise, this feature refers to individual quantum events, whereas the behavior of ensembles of such events is statistically determined. The indeterminism of individual quantum events is constrained by statistical laws.
Going further we may not only use the above noted indeterminacy of particle behaviour as is found in Quantum theory; but also, we apply Einstein's energy-time form of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For, at microscopic level force-based interactions between bodies can be viewed in terms of exchanges of so-called "virtual particles." That is, once the product of the energy and time involved in a particle being exchanged between two interacting bodies falls below the value of Planck's constant h (suitably multiplied or divided by a small constant), bodies may interact through exchanging undetected -- so, "virtual" -- particles. We can in effect have a situation crudely similar to two people tugging or pushing on opposite ends of a stick: they interact through the means of the intervening stick; which we then see as attractions or repulsions between the bodies. It may help to add a quick outline from Wikipedia as a point of reference:
In physics, a virtual particle is a transient fluctuation that exhibits some of the characteristics of an ordinary particle, but whose existence is limited by the uncertainty principle. The concept of virtual particles arises in perturbation theory of quantum field theory where interactions between ordinary particles are described in terms of exchanges of virtual particles. Any process involving virtual particles admits a schematic representation known as a Feynman diagram, in which virtual particles are represented by internal lines.[1][2] Virtual particles do not necessarily carry the same mass as the corresponding real particle, although they always conserve energy and momentum. The longer the virtual particle exists, the closer its characteristics come to those of ordinary particles. They are important in the physics of many processes, including particle scattering and Casimir forces. In quantum field theory, even classical forces—such as the electromagnetic repulsion or attraction between two charges—can be thought of as due to the exchange of many virtual photons between the charges.
Thus, we can open the doorway to a model of the workings of the brain-mind interface. As Scott Calef therefore observes:
Keith Campbell writes, “The indeterminacy of quantum laws means that any one of a range of outcomes of atomic events in the brain is equally compatible with known physical laws. And differences on the quantum scale can accumulate into very great differences in overall brain condition. So there is some room for spiritual activity even within the limits set by physical law. There could be, without violation of physical law, a general spiritual constraint upon what occurs inside the head.” (p.54). Mind could act upon physical processes by “affecting their course but not breaking in upon them.” (p.54). If this is true, the dualist could maintain the conservation principle but deny a fluctuation in energy because the mind serves to “guide” or control neural events by choosing one set of quantum outcomes rather than another. Further, it should be remembered that the conservation of energy is designed around material interaction; it is mute on how mind might interact with matter. After all, a Cartesian rationalist might insist, if God exists we surely wouldn’t say that He couldn’t do miracles just because that would violate the first law of thermodynamics, would we? [Article, "Dualism and Mind," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]
We don't know, we must be open, but that is the point: neither mechanical determinism nor randomness rise to the level of rational, responsible contemplation. Something else is credibly at work. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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“In other words, a non-religious person should rationally conclude that life was designed.” Yet few do. “But the insistence that consciousness lives outside the brain is a transparent attempt to push religious beliefs into science. It’s not only questionable science – it’s questionable religion. It’s based largely on the premise that God is incapable of creating consciousness within an organ.” Agreed. “Worse, it siphons away ID’s deserved credibility by placing it side-by-side with religious beliefs. ID is credible but faces massive skepticism and opposition. Why are some so desperate to sabotage it and go out of their way to ensure that it’s never viewed as legitimate science?” Again, I fully agree. ID proponents are not doing ID any good by repeatedly talking about religion, or the soul, or consciousness outside the brain. Or about objective morality. These types of arguments from fellow ID supporters just makes it easy for those on the fence about ID to lump it in as a religious belief and not a legitimate science. And for those opposed to ID to ridicule it as pseudoscience.Molson Bleu_{February 3, 2018
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Follow the evidence wherever it leads, consequences be damned. But at the same time, certain ideas have to be rejected because if you accept them you become literally Hitler! Ridiculous. You can't have it both ways.Jul3s_{February 3, 2018
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To say that life was designed follows reason and all of the available scientific knowledge. In other words, a non-religious person should rationally conclude that life was designed. But the insistence that consciousness lives outside the brain is a transparent attempt to push religious beliefs into science. It's not only questionable science - it's questionable religion. It's based largely on the premise that God is incapable of creating consciousness within an organ. We're quick to point out when Darwinists make arguments that are more religious then scientific. This is no different. Worse, it siphons away ID's deserved credibility by placing it side-by-side with religious beliefs. ID is credible but faces massive skepticism and opposition. Why are some so desperate to sabotage it and go out of their way to ensure that it's never viewed as legitimate science?OldAndrew_{February 3, 2018
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daveS @ 12: Depends on how you define "physical." If put in standard terms, I expect not, as I expect the "physical" is incomplete (and am not alone in this); and if mind is modulable via matter, I have little (no) reason to expect it's not modulable within the complement of the physical with respect to the superset.LocalMinimum_{February 3, 2018
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MB @ 14: If we are merely physical instantiations, we can be stored as data. If we aren't, maybe we can be stored as data in some higher order medium, or we're actually composed of unique components that can be stuffed in a pocket and are immanently eternal. I can have a really hard time recreating a desktop environment that I prefer, I'm not worried that my mind/soul isn't unique or individual if it's based on a far more complicated device. I have faith in YHWH's data storage solution, whatever that may or may not be.LocalMinimum_{February 3, 2018
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Frankly, I have never been able to get too worked up over the material vs non material mind/soul/consciousness. I think even materialist would agree that the mind is more than the sum of the brain’s parts. It seems to me that the big bone of contention is whether or not we have an immortal soul. Obviously, we would all like to exist forever, but with the immortal soul is it not possible, or likely, that we are trying to imposing one of our strongest desires on reality. Does it really matter if our soul is immortal?Molson Bleu_{February 3, 2018
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Embodied consciousness.kairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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KF,
PPS: Some deemed unconscious or dismissed as “vegetable” may instead be locked-in.
Yes. For that matter, even literal vegetables could conceivably have consciousness, which may not be detectable based on their "behavior", such as it is. That notion seems far-fetched, however. Are we all agreed that some sort of physical "brain" is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, for consciousness? Edited: Yes, embodied consciousness. Angels, God, etc, are conscious, but do not have physical bodies.daveS_{February 3, 2018
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MB, the track record of H G Wells is there for all to see. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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“A grim warning, especially when parallelled with Darwin’s Descent of Man ch 6 and Heine’s warning from the 1830’s..” And damned entertaining reading. Don’t you think that you might be taking the ‘cautions From science fiction’ a little too seriously? I have a friend who is a moderately successful sci fi writer (that is where I got the space vampires from). Good sci fi is always addressing the ‘what if’ question. But there is nothing saying that the ‘what if’ has to be possible.Molson Bleu_{February 3, 2018
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Ponder the PS OP, that we are trans-dimensional hybrids so that the soul is an interface and bridge between spirit and body. In which case, arguably we are here to do good, opening up a world of freely done virtues crowned by love. KF PS: Depending on what is damaged, break down of physically small or relatively large parts of a smart phone, tablet or PC can have disproportionately large or small effects. Such is the nature of a device that uses interfaces. PPS: Some deemed unconscious or dismissed as "vegetable" may instead be locked-in. Sleep or sleep-like states also have quite varying effects. BA77 may want to elaborate. He has already spoken to NDE's.kairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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If human soul is responsible for consciousness, why do we need a brain? If human soul is responsible for consciousness, why people are unconscious and can't remember anything under general anaesthetic? Some people had the majority of their brains removed and they function fine. Some had small parts damaged and they are unconscious. If the soul is responsible for consciousness, why those people are unconscious?J-Mac_{February 3, 2018
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PS: Let me excerpt opening remarks from the first chapter of War of the Worlds, 1898:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water . . . No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us . . . . looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas. And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them. And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
A grim warning, especially when parallelled with Darwin's Descent of Man ch 6 and Heine's warning from the 1830's..kairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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daveS @ 2
Does this raise problems with the way organs are actually harvested? My understanding is that this process is allowed once “brain death” has occurred. But if the mind is not purely a function of the brain, then perhaps brain death does not imply mind death, in which case we’re killing and removing organs from people whose minds are still functioning.
Leave it to someone who champions the atheistic worldview to try to use objective morality, which can only be rationally grounded within the Theistic worldview, to try to argue against the reality of the mind.
Where Do Good and Evil Come From? - Peter Kreeft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xliyujhwhNM
It is absurd that atheists have to continually 'borrow' from Theism in order to try to argue against Theism. As Dr. Hunter observed,
"Hawking’s entire argument is built upon theism. He is, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face. Take that part about the “human mind” for example. Under atheism there is no such thing as a mind. There is no such thing as understanding and no such thing as truth. All Hawking is left with is a box, called a skull, which contains a bunch of molecules. Hawking needs God In order to deny Him." - Cornelius Hunter Photo – an atheist contemplating his 'mind' http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H-kjiGN_9Fw/URkPboX5l2I/AAAAAAAAATw/yN18NZgMJ-4/s1600/rob4.jpg
That atheists have to continually 'borrow' from Theism in order to try to deny Theism is yet more proof that once you have denied the reality of your own mind, you have in fact lost your mind.
Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself - Nancy Pearcey - March 8, 2015 Excerpt: Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality. The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/03/why_evolutionar094171.html
bornagain77_{February 3, 2018
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MB, I particularly had in mind H G Wells' series of works. War of the Worlds anticipated the Holocaust. Island of Dr Moreau is about ethically dark science and mad scientists. Time Machine projects class war to cannibalism. Where, you may not know he was taught by Darwin's Bulldog in Uni, Huxley. And of course Brave New World came out of the Huxley family. Where, 1984 and Animal Farm by Orwell come up for honourable mention. More recent Sci Fi has relevant ideas, e.g. Weber's world of cloning, genetic modifications and more leading to a new form of slavery. Some of what is discussed -- and -- if word out of China is to be believed (organ harvesting from prisoners condemned under questionable circumstances) -- actually done today comes right out of that whole line of thought. I did not have in mind stuff like Star Trek communicators and smart phones or the proposal to mount laser weapons in upcoming fighter jets or the like. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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“Sci Fi of today too often becomes reality of tomorrow. ” I’m going to start stocking up on garlic to ward off those space vampires. :)Molson Bleu_{February 3, 2018
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DS, we do indeed need to ponder very sobering things about the ethics of current and future medical practice. For one, consider cloning for organ harvesting or even imagined personality transplants as various Sci Fi authors have brought up. Sci Fi of today too often becomes reality of tomorrow. KFkairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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Hm. Does this raise problems with the way organs are actually harvested? My understanding is that this process is allowed once "brain death" has occurred. But if the mind is not purely a function of the brain, then perhaps brain death does not imply mind death, in which case we're killing and removing organs from people whose minds are still functioning.daveS_{February 3, 2018
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BA77 links on the consequences of mind = brain ideologieskairosfocus_{February 3, 2018
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