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BA77, replies to prof Lombrozo on Evolutionary Belief and Cultural Factors

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I think BA77’s reply deserves to be headlined, as a part of the issue on self-falsification of evolutionary materialism.

First, a picture:

Of Lemmings, marches of folly and cliffs of self-falsifying absurdity . . .
Of Lemmings, marches of folly and cliffs of self-falsifying absurdity . . .

Now, the clip:

>>as to Lombrozo’s comment here:

“in the last 20 years or so, research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion has increasingly focused on another factor that contributes to evolutionary disbelief: the very cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition.”

There is a mechanism underlying my cognitive abilities? Really???

Something smells rotten in Denmark! Let’s analyze this a bit more closely with our ‘mechanism’ of human cognition shall we?:

Cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc.
per wikipedia:

As to all that “judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making” of human cognition, exactly how does Lombrozo propose we do all that “problem solving and decision making” if she, as a materialist, denies we have the free will to make decisions in the first place?

[Nancy Pearcey] When Reality Clashes with Your Atheistic Worldview – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Kpn3HBMiQ

[youtube C0Kpn3HBMiQ]

Sam Harris’s Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It – Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012
Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.
By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2…..66221.html

(1) rationality implies a thinker in control of thoughts.
(2) under materialism a thinker is an effect caused by processes in the brain.
(3) in order for materialism to ground rationality a thinker (an effect) must control processes in the brain (a cause). (1)&(2)
(4) no effect can control its cause.
Therefore materialism cannot ground rationality.
per Box UD

The practical benefits of believing in free will and that you are not a robot (several studies):
https://uncommondescent.com…..ent-565274

Perhaps after Lombrozo turns her incredible analytical/cognitive abilities on her unsolved problem of free will in her materialistic worldview, i.e. figuring out exactly how we can possibly make rational decisions without the inherent ability to make rational decisions, she can then turn her incredible analytical talents on the hard problem of consciousness?

David Chalmers on Consciousness (Philosophical Zombies and the Hard Problem) – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

Philosophical Zombies – cartoon
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/11

‘But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.’
David Barash – Materialist/Atheist Darwinian Psychologist

“We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.”
Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor

There is simply no direct evidence that anything material is capable of generating consciousness. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor says,

“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. Regardless of our knowledge of the structure of the brain, no one has any idea how the brain could possibly generate conscious experience.”

As Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry wrote,

“Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.”

From modern physics, Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner agreed:

“We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind.”
Contemporary physicist Nick Herbert states,

“Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”

Physician and author Larry Dossey wrote:

“No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians’ hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it.”

Mind and Cosmos – Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False – Thomas Nagel
Excerpt: If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history.
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/pro…..9919758.do

Consciousness Does Not Compute (and Never Will), Says Korean Scientist – May 05, 2015
Excerpt: “Non-computability of Consciousness” documents Song’s quantum computer research into TS (technological singularity (TS) or strong artificial intelligence). Song was able to show that in certain situations, a conscious state can be precisely and fully represented in mathematical terms, in much the same manner as an atom or electron can be fully described mathematically. That’s important, because the neurobiological and computational approaches to brain research have only ever been able to provide approximations at best. In representing consciousness mathematically, Song shows that consciousness is not compatible with a machine.
Song’s work also shows consciousness is not like other physical systems like neurons, atoms or galaxies. “If consciousness cannot be represented in the same way all other physical systems are represented, it may not be something that arises out of a physical system like the brain,” said Song. “The brain and consciousness are linked together, but the brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is something altogether different and separate. The math doesn’t lie.”
Of note: Daegene Song obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford
http://www.prnewswire.com/news…..77306.html

Mathematical Model Of Consciousness Proves Human Experience Cannot Be Modeled On A Computer – May 2014
Excerpt: The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people enjoy genuinely [integrated] consciousness or that brain processes can be modeled computationally,” say Maguire and co.
Since Tononi’s main assumption is that consciousness is the experience of integrated information, it is the second idea that must be abandoned: brain processes cannot be modeled computationally.
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/mathematical-model-of-consciousness-proves-human-experience-cannot-be-modelled-on-a-computer-898b104158d

I think Lombrozo has her work cut out for her on the hard problem. :)>>

Indeed, there is a challenge to be addressed. Let us see what evolutionary materialist scientism advocates have to say. END

Comments
Dionisio @126
Can you help REC to understand the questions/comments @124 & @125?
I looked at the article at the link REC provided. On the decision-making process:
Intentions, Haynes found, are also predictable. ... The volunteers told the researchers which letter was in front of their eyes when they chose which button to press. Haynes and his coworkers found that not only could the classifier predict which button a volunteer was about to press, it could predict it far earlier than volunteer was able to — up to seven seconds before the volunteer reported consciously choosing which button to push. ... With this study, Haynes established that our brains know some things before we do. “Not all of our decisions are made consciously,” he says.
The "simpler example with the lines":
They showed a volunteer first one set of parallel lines, then another set in a different orientation. They told the volunteer to remember one of the sets. Then after an 11-second pause, they asked the volunteer to recall the orientation they kept in mind. During that pause, the overall brain activity in the early visual areas of the brain often returned to normal. However, even at that low level of activity (no greater than would be expected when viewing a blank screen), Tong found that pattern classifiers could pick out subtle shifts in brain patterns associated with each orientation, and could still be trained to predict which orientation the volunteer held in memory. “We can see these faint echoes of what they saw before, what they are actively holding in mind,” Tong says. “That would be invisible if we didn’t do multivoxel pattern analysis.” Tong’s study shows that working memory resides in the early visual areas of the brain, a zone where few expected to find such a higher thought process. And it helps establish that images held only in the mind are robust enough that pattern algorithms can decode and predict them.
And you asked REC:
In the simpler example with the lines, is there anything said about detecting and decoding the information that corresponds to the actual decision process that led to pick one case or the other? They seem to have figured out (at least partially) the neural encoding/decoding of the images, but what about the decision process?
They are farther from understanding the brain in that kind of detail than jungle savages are from understanding how a computer does calculations. Modern science does not even know how to build from scratch a single-celled, self-replicating life form, much less have a grip on the workings of the most functionally complex phenomenon in the Universe yet known to us: the human brain, with its hundred billion interconnected cells. As for the implication -- it wasn't stated explicitly -- that we have no free will, since it appears to the researchers that the physical brain has already determined what we are going to choose before we consciously choose it: Assuming for the moment that there may indeed be a correlation between detectable brain activity and utterly inconsequential decisions we are going to make in the next few seconds, the question becomes: Does that really say anything at all about free will? No. It doesn't. And it doesn't give us a clue about what kind of brain activity takes place when decisions with grave consequences are made, or what brain activity looks like when our prior reflection leads us to what we "ought" to decide, but we choose the opposite, and when our choice corresponds to our prior reflection's suggestion of what we "ought" to decide. In other words, the results of these experiments say nothing about free will where free will matters.harry
July 5, 2015
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BA77 Thank you for that interesting information. I'm looking into it. Regarding the interlocutor REC @13, should we expect any reply to questions @124? REC posted a reference to a paper @13 and used it as a debate argument. I've noticed some interlocutors avoid answering follow up questions. Any idea why? Perhaps this is not the case, because REC hasn't seen post @124 yet? Let's assume so. :)Dionisio
July 5, 2015
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Dionisio this may be of interest to you: Fallacies of Contemporary Neuroscience: "A Vast Collection of Answers, with No Memory of the Questions" - Michael Egnor - February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Philosopher Ed Feser has a great post on the fallacies of contemporary neuroscience: We've had several occasions... to examine the fallacies committed by those who suppose that contemporary neuroscience has radically altered our understanding of human nature, and even undermined our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, rational, freely choosing agents. In a recent Spectator essay, Roger Scruton comments on the fad for neuroscientific pseudo-explanations within the humanities, labeling it "neuroenvy." Here's an especially insightful passage from the piece: [Scruton:] Neuroenvy... consist[s] of a vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions. And the answers are encased in neurononsense of the following kind:?? 'The brains of social animals are wired to feel pleasure in the exercise of social dispositions such as grooming and co-operation, and to feel pain when shunned, scolded, or excluded. Neurochemicals such as vasopressin and oxytocin mediate pair-bonding, parent-offspring bonding, and probably also bonding to kith and kin...' (Patricia Churchland).?? As though we didn't know already that people feel pleasure in grooming and co-operating, and as though it adds anything to say that their brains are 'wired' to this effect, or that 'neurochemicals' might possibly be involved in producing it. This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions. "A vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions" is a stunningly accurate way to describe the modern fallacy of attributing mental acts to physical brain processes. No one doubts that mental states are associated with brain states. But it is breathtakingly naïve to assert that the mental state is "explained" in any meaningful way by the brain state. Regional changes in brain blood flow measured by fMRI scanning don't explain the love (or hate or anger or belief or joy) we feel at the moment the changes are measured. Thoughts and emotions are mental acts that inherently entail intentionality (reference to something other than self), qualia (the subjective experience of things) that transcend mechanical explanation. Crude materialist reductionism has little real explanatory power. Modern neuroscience has provided so many answers that we've forgotten the questions. Feser suggests the antidote to neuroenvy: Materialists typically assume that the Cartesian move is what anyone who criticizes their reductionism must be committed to. (See Chapter 4 of Aquinas for a detailed account of the differences between the Aristotelian-Thomistic and Cartesian views of human nature.) And so deeply and unreflectively have they imbibed reductionist thinking that they fail to perceive that the arguments that they think prove reductionism really only assume reductionism -- begging the question, and none too subtly at that. In particular, they fail to see that the stuff about increased dopamine levels "proves" that addicts lack moral responsibility, or that Libet's experiments "prove" that we lack free will, only if we already assume that human action is entirely reducible to the neural phenomena in question, which is of course precisely what is at issue. And they would also beg the question were they to insist that categories like formal and final causation are acceptable only if they can somehow be reduced to those recognized by physics, chemistry, biology, or neuroscience. Meanwhile, critics like Scruton and Raymond Tallis, while they rightly denounce reductionism of both a materialist or Cartesian sort, fail to put in its place a systematic rival metaphysics like the Aristotelian one. Powerful as their criticisms are, their positive account of human nature is bound to seem obscurantist to those who cannot see any plausible alternative to materialism as a general conception of the natural world. For it takes a metaphysics to counter a metaphysics. Until materialism, scientism, and naturalism are not only criticized but replaced with something better, they will not lose the baneful grip on modern culture that Scruton and Tallis rightly deplore. Materialist reductionism of the mind is a foolish mistake. A rudimentary mistake. The Aristotelian hylomorphic understanding of the mind is a correction for that mistake, and seems to me to be closest to the truth. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/02/fallacies_of_co082351.html Among the Mind Deniers: A Darwinist Mathematician Reflects on Philosophy - Michael Egnor - October 26, 2014 Excerpt: "Paul and Patricia Churchland are materialist philosophers who champion reductive materialism, which is the viewpoint that the mind does not exist at all. We have been tricked by "folk psychology" into thinking that we think. We are merely brains, tricked by our neurotransmitters into believing that we have beliefs. Shallit thinks this form of materialism is particularly profound. Actually he doesn't think ... or... he thinks that he doesn't think that he does think.... Goodness gracious, materialism is confusing. What is revealing about Shallit's denial is the extent to which materialists will go to insulate their ideology from critique. Philosophers raise profound questions about the validity -- and even the coherence -- of materialist theories of the mind. Rather than take those critiques seriously, Shallit denies the relevance of philosophical inquiry." http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/10/among_the_mind090631.html also of note, MRIs were originally invented by a Christian in the first place! http://creation.com/the-not-so-nobel-decision-raymond-damadian-mribornagain77
July 5, 2015
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KF Are posts @124 & @125 valid? Bottom line, are the actual decisions made by the volunteer in the paper referenced by REC @13 recorded anywhere? Are they encoded and stored somewhere? Does the given paper say anything about them? BTW, the statement "figured out" @124 was written with tongue in cheek. That's a gross overstatement. They haven't figured it out completely yet. It's not that simple. They're dealing with elaborate complexity. The reverse engineering process is very difficult. It took the soviets and their eastern European satellites several years to reverse engineer the IBM/360 and IBM/370 systems during Cold War 1.0. The neural systems are much more complex than any human-designed technology. Thank youDionisio
July 5, 2015
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BA77 Please, help with posts @124 & @125 Thank youDionisio
July 5, 2015
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harry @17 Can you help REC to understand the questions/comments @124 & @125? Thank you.Dionisio
July 5, 2015
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REC @13 Do you understand the questions @124 which relate to your post #13? Do you need help to answer those questions? You may ask KF, harry or BA77 to help you with understanding the questions @124Dionisio
July 5, 2015
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REC @13
http://www.bcr.org/content/tapping-brain-decoding-fmri
In the simpler example with the lines, is there anything said about detecting and decoding the information that corresponds to the actual decision process that led to pick one case or the other? They seem to have figured out (at least partially) the neural encoding/decoding of the images, but what about the decision process? BTW, as other folks stated before, what is stored in memory (either working/short or long term) is a representation of the images, not the images. Both encoding and decoding mechanisms are required to store/retrieve the images in/from memory.Dionisio
July 4, 2015
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rhampton7
If Jesus was materially real (his human half), why not angels
I would like to discuss this with you some time. If you're saying that angels are material/physical beings, I'm very open to your argument in that regard. In this case, angels would occupy space, be composed of matter and would need some explanation for their origin, movements, powers, geography -- and why they have not been detected scientifically. But until then, hope you have a happy 4th.Silver Asiatic
July 4, 2015
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MatSpirit
And on the screen a cross hatch slowly appears
"ON THE SCREEN" not in the physical brain from which the signal was captured that was displayed on the screen. The bytes of which a JPEG file consists are not the image. The image doesn't appear until those bytes are processed and displayed on some appropriate medium. The electrochemical activity of the brain is not the image. The image doesn't appear until that activity is translated into an image and displayed on the "screen" of the mind's eye. Zeros and ones stored in digital memory are not an image. Electrochemical activity is not an image. The image doesn't appear until it is displayed on an appropriate medium, a physical screen or the non-material screen of the mind's eye.harry
July 4, 2015
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'E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros.' I don't really mean to 'knock' il Papa Francesco, as he really does seem to be 'the gift that just keeps on giving', but I think this should give the lie to his dismissive remark about God not being a magician(conjuror), etc., but just front loading the basic vehicles to develop in their own time, so to speak - because it would essentially be too trivial a task for him to occupy himself with. He must have forgotten the birds, when they fall, and each hair on our head. It's surely no sweat to our omniscient God to keep track of the least movement of the smallest E-Coli bacterium. PS: I was surprised to see the Library of Congress didn't appear in that list, BA77. For some reason I'd always thought of it as the 'cat's whiskers'.Axel
July 4, 2015
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I think I'll make a T-Shirt: Proud to be an IDiot!Mung
July 3, 2015
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Roy, after thinking it over I would like to apologize for calling you an idiot. Although I have been called many names by atheists over the years, that is no excuse for stooping to that low level and responding in kind. Thus I am sorry. I should have made my disappointment with your mistake known in a more gracious manner. While I'm at it, I would like to also apologize to all the real IDiots out there that I may have offended! :)bornagain77
July 3, 2015
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Of note to RH7's claim that 'information recorded as energy or mass is a material, measurable phenomena', I would like to point out that even though information has no weight, there is another method by which information can be physically measured. As noted previously, it is now established that information has a thermodynamic content:
Maxwell’s demon demonstration (knowledge of a particle’s position) turns information into energy – November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the “Maxwell demon” thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a “spiral-staircase-like” potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010 Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform
And by taking this 'thermodynamic content' of information into consideration, it is possible to calculate the information content of a bacterium. Although I'm sure the following researchers did not use Jarzynski 'refined' equation in which they finally proved information has a thermodynamic content, the researchers, using 'crude equations', were, none the less, able to give a ball-park figure for the information content of a simple cell from a thermodynamic perspective:
"Is there a real connection between entropy in physics and the entropy of information? ....The equations of information theory and the second law are the same, suggesting that the idea of entropy is something fundamental..." Siegfried, Dallas Morning News, 5/14/90, [Quotes Robert W. Lucky, Ex. Director of Research, AT&T, Bell Laboratories & John A. Wheeler, of Princeton & Univ. of TX, Austin] Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: - Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz' deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18hO1bteXTPOqQtd2H12PI5wFFoTjwg8uBAU5N0nEQIE/edit “a one-celled bacterium, e. coli, is estimated to contain the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Expressed in information in science jargon, this would be the same as 10^12 bits of information. In comparison, the total writings from classical Greek Civilization is only 10^9 bits, and the largest libraries in the world – The British Museum, Oxford Bodleian Library, New York Public Library, Harvard Widenier Library, and the Moscow Lenin Library – have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.” – R. C. Wysong 'The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica." Carl Sagan, "Life" in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894 HISTORY OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY – WISTAR DESTROYS EVOLUTION Excerpt: A number of mathematicians, familiar with the biological problems, spoke at that 1966 Wistar Institute,, For example, Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that,, E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. *Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm
bornagain77
July 3, 2015
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Roy after persisting in the same mistake 3 times in a row I have to no other option but to conclude you are not an IDiot but an actual idiot. FYI, RH7 posted the hard drive link. A link from which I excerpted so as to better refute his claim with his own link. That you would make such a willfully ignorant mistake three times in a row is gross intellectual negligence on your part! And although I readily admit I could have worded Landauer’s principle a little more clearly, I stand by the 'surprising' fact that I was trying to draw out. Namely, the fact that if information is not erased from a computer, and reversible computation employed, then 'ballistic computation' can be accomplished with 'amazingly tiny amounts of energy',,,
it may yet be possible to set up reversible computations that dissipate such amazingly tiny amounts of energy that the dissipation is not a barrier to anything that we might wish to do with them – I call such computations ballistic. We are a long way from achieving ballistic computation, but we do not yet know of any fundamental reasons that forbid it from ever being technically possible. http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/revcomp/faq.html#zeroenergy
That computation can possibly be accomplished with 'amazingly tiny amounts of energy' is a very surprising finding in my book.bornagain77
July 3, 2015
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Roy, I suggest you re-examine the exchange from 55 on with RH7. BA77 responded in that context. KF PS: this is a side topic and I would be far happier to see a focus on the original focus, especially the tendency to reduce cognition to mechanistic forces, and the implications regarding responsible freedom. That is far more central to matters of significant moment.kairosfocus
July 3, 2015
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KF @ 100: Yes, I know that information cannot be measured by mass. It was ba77, not me, that was trying to calculate the mass of a hard drive in different states.Roy
July 3, 2015
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Roy, rampton7 was to one who claimed that information was a materially ‘measurable phenomena’, and was the one who referenced a change in mass to try to back up his claim that information was a materially ‘measurable phenomena’. As stated before, I suggest you go back and read the posts very slowly for clarity.
It doesn't matter how often I read them, I keep seeing you stating that Meyer's argument holds because a burnt CD weighs less than a blank one. It's clear as crystal. I also keep seeing that it was you that insisted on calculating the mass difference for a hard drive. Perhaps you should go back and reread them? Then maybe you'll be able to contribute something other than misplaced condescension. P.S. How's your new principle coming along? Have you applied it to abaci yet?Roy
July 3, 2015
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supplemental note Can reversible computing really dissipate absolutely zero energy? Of course not. Any non-equilibrium physical system (whether a computer or a rock) dissipates energy at some rate,,, Okay, then can reversible computing really make the energy dissipation of a computation be an arbitrarily small non-zero amount? Only insofar as the computer can be arbitrarily well isolated from unwanted interactions, errors, and energy leakage,,, But, despite all these caveats, it may yet be possible to set up reversible computations that dissipate such amazingly tiny amounts of energy that the dissipation is not a barrier to anything that we might wish to do with them - I call such computations ballistic. We are a long way from achieving ballistic computation, but we do not yet know of any fundamental reasons that forbid it from ever being technically possible. http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/revcomp/faq.html#zeroenergybornagain77
July 3, 2015
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how we processkairosfocus
July 3, 2015
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Harry, that second picture IS an example of an image we're seeing in our mind’s eye being displayed in the back of the physical brain - the same area the brain uses to process vision. The experiment was pretty straight forward. A volunteer injects a weak radioactive liquid into a vein and sits down with the back of his head resting on the radiation detectors. The volunteer closes his eyes and just imagines a cross hatch. His eyes are closed, he's just picturing a cross hatch in his mind. And on the screen a cross hatch slowly appears. It's faint and it's fuzzy, but its unmistakably a cross hatch. And then the volunteer stops thinking about a cross hatch and pictures a circle in his mind's eye and a circle appears on the screen. The volunteer closes his eyes and imagines a figure and that mental activity makes neurons work harder so they show up on the screen. And those neurons are in the same area the brain uses for vision, a big clue about how we see what we're imagining.MatSpirit
July 3, 2015
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Roy, RH7 et al: It is first patent that Shannon showed how to measure information carrying capacity. Second, BA77 and others are correct to point out that meaningfulness and functionality cannot be weighed up or the like. Carving vs writing speaks volumes, as does the storage of info in a phase change on R/W CD ROMS etc. Likewise, info stored in magnetic alignments. Information is not a crudely physical quantity measurable as mass. Further to this, all of this is on a side track, the core reality being distracted from being that functionally specific complex information is only observed as actually caused by designing intelligence. But, there is a whole school of thought that pivots on the most spectacular cases of such FSCI we can see coming about effectively by lucky noise; where it should be seen readily that differential reproductive success across varieties SUBTRACTS information from the biosphere by extinction, it is not the source of information. So, we are left with a speculation of incremental lucky noise writing huge quantities of FSCI, which has never been actually observed, spectacularly failing the vera causa test. KFkairosfocus
July 3, 2015
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Also of interest is that the integrated coding between the DNA, RNA and Proteins of the cell apparently seem to be ingeniously programmed along the very stringent guidelines laid out in Landauer’s principle, (by Charles Bennett from IBM of Quantum Teleportation fame), for ‘reversible computation’ in order to achieve such amazing energy/metabolic efficiency as it does. Logical Reversibility of Computation* - C. H. Bennett - 1973 Excerpt from last paragraph: The biosynthesis and biodegradation of messenger RNA may be viewed as convenient examples of logically reversible and irreversible computation, respectively. Messenger RNA. a linear polymeric informational macromolecule like DNA, carries the genetic information from one or more genes of a DNA molecule. and serves to direct the synthesis of the proteins encoded by those genes. Messenger RNA is synthesized by the enzyme RNA polymerase in the presence of a double-stranded DNA molecule and a supply of RNA monomers (the four nucleotide pyrophosphates ATP, GTP, CTP, and UTP) [7]. The enzyme attaches to a specific site on the DNA molecule and moves along, sequentially incorporating the RNA monomers into a single-stranded RNA molecule whose nucleotide sequence exactly matches that of the DNA. The pyrophosphate groups are released into the surrounding solution as free pyrophosphate molecules. The enzyme may thus be compared to a simple tape-copying Turing machine that manufactures its output tape rather than merely writing on it. Tape copying is a logically reversible operation. and RNA polymerase is both thermodynamically and logically reversible.,,, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall04/cos576/papers/bennett73.html Notes on Landauer’s principle, reversible computation, and Maxwell’s Demon - Charles H. Bennett - September 2003 Excerpt: Of course, in practice, almost all data processing is done on macroscopic apparatus, dissipating macroscopic amounts of energy far in excess of what would be required by Landauer’s principle. Nevertheless, some stages of biomolecular information processing, such as transcription of DNA to RNA, appear to be accomplished by chemical reactions that are reversible not only in principle but in practice.,,,, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135521980300039X Logically and Physically Reversible Natural Computing: A Tutorial - 2013 Excerpt: This year marks the 40th anniversary of Charles Bennett’s seminal paper on reversible computing. Bennett’s contribution is remembered as one of the first to demonstrate how any deterministic computation can be simulated by a logically reversible Turing machine. Perhaps less remembered is that the same paper suggests the use of nucleic acids to realise physical reversibility. In context, Bennett’s foresight predates Leonard Adleman’s famous experiments to solve instances of the Hamiltonian path problem using strands of DNA — a landmark date for the field of natural computing — by more than twenty years. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-38986-3_20 The amazing energy efficiency possible with ‘reversible computation’ has been known about since Charles Bennett laid out the principles for such reversible programming in 1973, but as far as I know, due to the extreme level of complexity involved in achieving such ingenious ‘reversible coding’, has yet to be accomplished in any meaningful way for our computer programs even to this day: Reversible computing Excerpt: Reversible computing is a model of computing where the computational process to some extent is reversible, i.e., time-invertible.,,, Although achieving this goal presents a significant challenge for the design, manufacturing, and characterization of ultra-precise new physical mechanisms for computing, there is at present no fundamental reason to think that this goal cannot eventually be accomplished, allowing us to someday build computers that generate much less than 1 bit's worth of physical entropy (and dissipate much less than kT ln 2 energy to heat) for each useful logical operation that they carry out internally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing#The_reversibility_of_physics_and_reversible_computing Related note: The unavoidable cost of computation revealed - Physicists have proved that forgetting (erasure of information) is the undoing of Maxwell’s demon. - Philip Ball - 07 March 2012 Excerpt: To test the principle, the researchers created a simple two-state bit: a single microscopic silica bead held in a ‘light trap’ by a laser beam. The trap contains two ‘valleys’ where the particle can rest, one representing a 1 and the other a 0. It could jump between the two if the energy ‘hill’ separating them is not too high.,,, By monitoring the position and speed of the particle during a cycle of switching and resetting the bit, they could calculate how much energy was dissipated. Landauer’s limit applies only when the resetting is done infinitely slowly, and Lutz and colleagues found that, as they used longer switching cycles, the dissipation got smaller, heading towards a plateau equal to the amount predicted by Landauer.,,, More practically, Landauer’s principle implies a limit on how low the energy dissipation — and thus consumption — of a computer can be. “Heat dissipation in computer chips is one of the major problems hindering their miniaturization,” says Lutz.,,, Meanwhile, in fledgling quantum computers, which exploit the rules of quantum physics to achieve greater processing power, this limitation is already being confronted. “Logic processing in quantum computers already is well within the Landauer regime,” says physicist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “One has to worry about Landauer's principle all the time.” http://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186bornagain77
July 3, 2015
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Roy, rampton7 was to one who claimed that information was a materially 'measurable phenomena', and was the one who referenced a change in mass to try to back up his claim that information was a materially 'measurable phenomena'. As stated before, I suggest you go back and read the posts very slowly for clarity. Read the words aloud to yourself if it helps you understand the subject more clearly,,, (as if there could be such a thing as understanding in the materialistic worldview in the first place):bornagain77
July 3, 2015
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As to the claim that information is emergent from a material basis, it is important to note that, counter-intuitive to materialistic thought (and to every kid who has ever taken a math exam), a computer (and the brain) will not consume energy during the computation of information, but will only consume energy when information is erased from it. This counter-intuitive fact is formally known as Landauer’s Principle.
Landauer's principle states that there is a theoretical minimum energy requirement for performing irreversible computations. It does not state that reversible computations carried out using physical hardware require no energy. I suggest naming that idea "ba77's principle".Roy
July 3, 2015
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Seversky: if you wish to dismiss my argument -- and it is not just my argument -- that evolutionary materialistic scientism is self-referential, incoherent and self-falsifying, why not take it on in substantial form? For instance, here is Nancy Pearcey giving one facet of the argument, in her current Finding Truth:
A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent? Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. "This circle is square" is contradictory, so it has to be false. An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity -- which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself . . . . An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. But what if we apply that theory to itself? Then it, too, was selected for survival, not truth -- which discredits its own claim to truth. Evolutionary epistemology commits suicide. Astonishingly, many prominent thinkers have embraced the theory without detecting the logical contradiction. Philosopher John Gray writes, "If Darwin's theory of natural selection is true,... the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." What is the contradiction in that statement? Gray has essentially said, if Darwin's theory is true, then it "serves evolutionary success, not truth." In other words, if Darwin's theory is true, then it is not true. Self-referential absurdity is akin to the well-known liar's paradox: "This statement is a lie." If the statement is true, then (as it says) it is not true, but a lie. Another example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." But that means Crick's own theory is not a "scientific truth." Applied to itself, the theory commits suicide. Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, "Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth." Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false. To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value. So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself. A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, "If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? ... Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it." On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, "Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?" His answer is no: "I have to be able to believe ... that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct -- not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so." Hence, "insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining."
She goes on to highlight a key gap in Darwin's reasoning, where he seems to have failed to recognise the self-referential, global incoherence in his argumentation:
People are sometimes under the impression that Darwin himself recognized the problem. They typically cite Darwin's famous "horrid doubt" passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." But, of course, Darwin's theory itself was a "conviction of man's mind." So why should it be "at all trustworthy"? Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in this theory. Why not? Because he expressed his "horrid doubt" selectively -- only when considering the case for a Creator. From time to time, Darwin admitted that he still found the idea of God persuasive. He once confessed his "inward conviction ... that the Universe is not the result of chance." It was in the next sentence that he expressed his "horrid doubt." So the "conviction" he mistrusted was his lingering conviction that the universe is not the result of chance. In another passage Darwin admitted, "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man." Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: "But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" That is, can it be trusted when it draws "grand conclusions" about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey's "instinctive fear and hatred of a snake." In short, it was on occasions when Darwin's mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. He failed to recognize that, to be logically consistent, he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory . . . . Applied consistently, Darwinism undercuts not only itself but also the entire scientific enterprise. Kenan Malik, a writer trained in neurobiology, writes, "If our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing which of these capacities lead to true beliefs and which to false ones." Thus "to view humans as little more than sophisticated animals ...undermines confidence in the scientific method." Just so. Science itself is at stake. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that according to atheism, "the mind that does science ... is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science." 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 . . .
This is much like Crick's notorious error in his The Astonishing Hypothesis:
. . . 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.
Here is Reppert, on another facet:
. . . 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.
Here is Haldane on another:
"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.]
Do, tell me, does not an argument or implication thereof that addresses human cognition refer to oneself once one makes it by thinking, speaking or writing etc? Is it not a commonplace that once we are in self-referential territory we must beware of circularities that beg questions or end in mutual contradiction? And, is is not reasonably and seriously arguable that such has happened? In which case, your rhetoric above boils down to little more than a dismissive ad hominem. One built on an empty strawman, as though merely alluding to my handle is grounds for dismissal without further argument. But, I have shown how spectacularly that rhetorical stunt fails. I suggest, there is a serious issue on the table to be answered by advocates of evolutionary materialism, and that it should be substantially addressed. KFkairosfocus
July 3, 2015
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Phinehas @ 99: Yes, it's an easy concept to grasp. ba77 may have found it difficult though, since he seemed to think the respective masses of recorded CDs and blank ones relevant. Why else would he bother to calculate the mass of the data on a hard drive and decide it was negligible compared to the mass of the drive itself?Roy
July 3, 2015
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Seversky, as to 'our understanding of the physical brain', a better example of the irrationality that atheistic materialism forces science into would be hard to find than in the human brain. Anybody in their right mind should readily admit that God created the human brain The human brain is simply 'beyond belief' in terms of its inherent complexity:
Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth - November 2010 Excerpt: They found that the brain's complexity is beyond anything they'd imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: ...One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor--with both memory-storage and information-processing elements--than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20023112-247.html The Half-Truths of Materialist Evolution - DONALD DeMARCO - 02/06/2015 Excerpt: but I would like to direct attention to the unsupportable notion that the human brain, to focus on a single phenomenon, could possibly have evolved by sheer chance. One of the great stumbling blocks for Darwin and other chance evolutionists is explaining how a multitude of factors simultaneously coalesce to form a unified, functioning system. The human brain could not have evolved as a result of the addition of one factor at a time. Its unity and phantasmagorical complexity defies any explanation that relies on pure chance. It would be an underestimation of the first magnitude to say that today’s neurophysiologists know more about the structure and workings of the brain than did Darwin and his associates. Scientists in the field of brain research now inform us that a single human brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on the entire planet! According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the brain’s complexity is staggering, beyond anything his team of researchers had ever imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. In the cerebral cortex alone, each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses that result, roughly, in a total of 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies! A single synapse may contain 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A synapse, simply stated, is the place where a nerve impulse passes from one nerve cell to another. Phantasmagorical as this level of unified complexity is, it places us merely at the doorway of the brain’s even deeper mind-boggling organization. Glial cells in the brain assist in neuron speed. These cells outnumber neurons 10 times over, with 860 billion cells. All of this activity is monitored by microglia cells that not only clean up damaged cells but also prune dendrites, forming part of the learning process. The cortex alone contains 100,000 miles of myelin-covered, insulated nerve fibers. The process of mapping the brain would indeed be time-consuming. It would entail identifying every synaptic neuron. If it took a mere second to identify each neuron, it would require four billion years to complete the project. http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-half-truths-of-materialist-evolution/ "Complexity Brake" Defies Evolution - August 8, 2012 Excerpt: Consider a neuronal synapse -- the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse -- about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years..., even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html
Now Seversky, you may hold that it is completely rational for you to believe that unguided material processes built that jaw dropping level of integrated complexity in the human brain, but I hold that not only is it irrational to believe unguided material processes built that unfathomable level of integrated complexity in the human brain, but that it is sheer insanity for you to believe as such. But since you deny free will, then I guess it is simply beyond your control and you have no choice but to believe completely insane things like that every once in awhile. Perhaps tomorrow the molecules of your brain will randomly reconfigure into a different pattern that will allow you, (whatever the person of 'you' really is in materialism), to finally believe that you are fearfully and wonderfully made by God!
Darwin's Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails - Nancy Pearcey - April 23, 2015 Excerpt: Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, "Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get." An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, "The impossibility of free will ... can be proved with complete certainty." Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. "To be honest, I can't really accept it myself," he says. "I can't really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?",,, In What Science Offers the Humanities, Edward Slingerland, identifies himself as an unabashed materialist and reductionist. Slingerland argues that Darwinian materialism leads logically to the conclusion that humans are robots -- that our sense of having a will or self or consciousness is an illusion. Yet, he admits, it is an illusion we find impossible to shake. No one "can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free." We are "constitutionally incapable of experiencing ourselves and other conspecifics [humans] as robots." One section in his book is even titled "We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe That We Are Robots.",,, When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine -- a "big bag of skin full of biomolecules" interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry. In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, "When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, ... see that they are machines." Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: "That is not how I treat them.... I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis." Certainly if what counts as "rational" is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis within Brooks's worldview. It sticks out of his box. How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn't. Brooks ends by saying, "I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs." He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/04/when_evolutiona095451.html Existential Argument against Atheism - November 1, 2013 by Jason Petersen 1. If a worldview is true then you should be able to live consistently with that worldview. 2. Atheists are unable to live consistently with their worldview. 3. If you can’t live consistently with an atheist worldview then the worldview does not reflect reality. 4. If a worldview does not reflect reality then that worldview is a delusion. 5. If atheism is a delusion then atheism cannot be true. Conclusion: Atheism is false. http://answersforhope.com/existential-argument-atheism/
bornagain77
July 2, 2015
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MatSpirit @101 See the images at the link posted by REC @ 13. The images there are much more impressive than a crosshatch. Even so, none of this means that the images we see in our mind's eye are being displayed in the physical brain somewhere. The brain is a physical device capable of storing ongoing signals generated from sources of audio produced by vibrating air and video produced by photons bouncing off of objects. It does this in some systematic way, just as audio and video can be stored digitally on a hard drive in your computer. The brain doesn't see or hear the sights and sounds it processes and stores any more than the computer and its hard drive does. As science and medicine have learned more about the physical brain, it has become possible to scan the brain as a signal is being processed and stored there, and reconstruct the sight (and someday the sounds) from which it was generated. This process isn't as refined as reconstructing the actual audio or video from a signal that was stored digitally on a hard drive, but to scan the electrochemical reactions in the brain as one looks at something and then translating that into an image that can be displayed is an astounding feat of medicine and science. Even so, it says nothing about how the mind sees. There is no image of what we see in the physical brain somewhere, yet we know an image is being displayed because we see. The displayed image we see has no material existence, nor does the soul that perceives it.harry
July 2, 2015
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Seversky,
Michael Egnor: Materialism is an amalgam of unexamined presuppositions (...)
Seversky: Is he serious? Are you serious?
Yes. Absolutely serious.
Seversky: What on earth do you and he think our understanding of the physical brain is if not materialistic?
Are you serious? How is this even related to what Egnor is saying?
Seversky: When Egnor goes into a human brain to operate, does he close his eyes like a Jedi master and rely on some mystical Force to guide his hands or does keep his eyes wide open and draw on a detailed knowledge of the brain’s physiology and biochemistry?
Are you barking mad? What are you responding to?Box
July 2, 2015
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