Today’s guest post is from nkendall:
We have looked at the phenomena of dreams LINK: Are Dreams Incompatible With Materialism? and constancy of self through near death experiences LINK: Constancy of Self in Light of Near Death Experiences – A Disproof of Materialism as disproofs of materialism. Now I want to look at continuity of thought as a disproof of materialism.
Have you ever noticed that your mind is always presented with a continuous stream of related thoughts? There are seldom, if ever, any gaps where your mind is blank. There always seems to be a single, whole, intact thought present in our conscious awareness. I suppose there are exceptions such as seizures. Remarkably, barring interruption, each distinct thought in a sequence of thoughts is related to the adjacent thoughts in time; those before and after and in the context of one’s experiences. This is true whether we are rehashing a similar set of thoughts from memory, or when we are daydreaming or when our imaginations are heightened and presenting us with a novel, sequence of thoughts. Even more astounding is when these streams of thought are found to be creative and unique in human history and contribute to the advancement of human knowledge, human artifacts, artistic renderings and expressions of goodness in fundamental ways. Can these marvelous qualities of mind be reconciled with materialism which posits only the physical brain to account for human consciousness and intellect? No, they cannot; not even in principle.
Let’s first look briefly at materialist claims regarding consciousness and human intellect and then examine them in light of the qualities of mind that we all experience each moment of our lives.
MATERIALISM
It is not known how thoughts could arise in the brain, how they could be represented in the brain or how they could be rendered in our consciousness much less what consciousness is. For many people these intractable problems are enough to dismiss materialism from the start. But materialism’s grip on Western thought has conditioned the educated class into thinking that there are no plausible alternatives to a brain-only hypothesis of human consciousness and intellect. Only by thinking about the details of our conscious thoughts and about what would have to be the case for materialism to be true, does materialism’s brain-only theory fall apart.
Materialism’s reductionist accounting of human intellect requires strict adherence to bottom up causation. Bottom up causation means that it is the sequences of molecular neural events that give rise to one’s thoughts and directs them to our conscious awareness for rendering–somehow. Therefore, the thoughts that appear in our conscious awareness are entirely determined by the prior local causal chain of molecular neural events. But if our thoughts are produced and determined by the prior causal chain of neural events in the brain then they would not be expected or necessitated in any way to produce a coherent, continuous sequences of related thoughts that were recognizable to our conscious experience. There would be no expectation that adjacent brain states (similar configurations) would result in “adjacent” (tightly related) mental states. This decoupling of local causation at the physical level and information and meaning at the mental experience level is a fundamental fact that materialism is bound by. Simply put, physical processes in the brain cannot possibly have any way of knowing what set of physical sequences in the brain would give rise to coherent mental sequences of thought. Therefore, materialism is left with either blind chance or determinism neither of which could possibly produce the rich mental lives we all experience.
COMPLEX, SPECIFIED INFORMATION
The sequences of molecular neural events that materialism claims give rise to our thoughts would have to be precise and they would have to be specific. They would have to be precise and specific because there are an incalculable array of thoughts that can arise in our minds and these must then have an incalculable number of physical arrangements to underlie them. Imagine an insight that you have had or bit of knowledge that you have acquired. Then think of the innumerable ways in which it could be slightly modified even in very subtle ways. Each version of this insight would have–must have if materialism is true–a slightly different underlying neural signature otherwise they would not be distinguishable from thoughts which were slightly different. Also, since these physical processes–these sequences of molecular neural events–would have to interface with other putative physical processes, a predictable outcome could only result if the processes themselves, and the interface between them, were precise and specific.
Because thoughts and insights unfold over time, they would have underlying sequences of arrangements, not just static arrangements. Once the first thought in a stream of related thoughts were brought forth in our conscious awareness, the subsequent thoughts would be constrained by the content (the meaning) of the initial thought and increasingly so with each new thought as this collection of emerging thoughts matured into a complete insight. The underlying physical processes which materialism claims give rise to these thoughts would, therefore, also be increasingly constrained and more tightly specified as more thoughts were brought forth just as the configurations in my brain causing the movements of my hands and fingers would have to be increasingly constrained as I type out this sentence.
Therefore, under a materialist assumption, in order for a continuous, coherent stream of related thoughts to occur, an enormous number of molecular components in the brain would have to be continuously arranged in increasingly very precise and specific ways. The sheer number of molecular components involved betrays a very high degree of complexity. These streams of thought would exhibit extraordinary quantities of complex, specified information and constitute irreducibly complex configurations.
Especially noteworthy are the spontaneous emergence of unique and novel thoughts that lead to an expansion of human knowledge in profound and important ways. Although each of us have unique and novel thought streams each day, most are not significant in this regard. If materialism is true, its account of such unique and novel phenomena would entail that the underlying local causation in the brain results in a unique sequence of arrangements of components in the brain–arrangements that these components would have never assumed before. In and of itself that is not significant. By chance, local physical causation of components in the brain will almost always result in unique configurations. But what is special about the complexity here is the types of unique, complex sequences of arrangements of neural molecular components. These arrangements would be highly specified and convey information at the mental level that has meaning–important meaning–in human discourse. These sequences of arrangements would comprise an infinitesimally small set of possible dynamic configurations of the brain’s molecular components, the vast majority of which would convey absolutely no useful information at all in human discourse. (This all of course assumes that a sequence of arrangements of molecules can produce any thing at the mental level at all as materialism claims.)
FOREKNOWLEDGE
In addition to a material mechanism to account for the generation of continuous sequences of novel, complex, specified arrangements of physical brain components, there would have to be a physical process in the brain that would somehow know in advance either where those specific neural circuits were that were incubating a spontaneous emerging thought or whether the outcome of a physical process is producing a thought that is useful in an existing sequence of related thoughts. This physical process would also have to know how these thoughts were structured and how they were bounded within the neural circuits such that a whole, distinct, coherent thought could be captured, sequestered, transmitted and presented to our consciousness in a timely fashion. These physical processes in the brain would have to pass these distinct thoughts to another unknown physical process which would serialize them properly with other emerging thoughts and prepare them for rendering in our conscious experience. How these physical processes would know where and when these useful related thoughts were emerging, how they were structured and bounded, how they should be sequence and rendered in our consciousness are intractable mysteries.
These seemingly omniscient and clairvoyant physical processes of engendering coherent, contextually relevant thoughts, locating and identifying them as they emerge, sequencing them and preparing them for rendering in our consciousness would have to be repeated continuously and unerringly throughout the entire life of a human such that our conscious awareness was continuously presented with a coherent stream of related thoughts. These putative physical processes of the brain would have to account for the seamless rendering of a continuous stream of thoughts despite interruptions from our senses. They would have to be able to continuously reassert prior thought streams and integrate them with our memories and with any new information presented through the senses.
PROBABILITIES
Despite the intuitive implausibility of materialist claims given the foregoing, it is not possible to adequately quantify the probabilities. There are at least two reasons for this. First, we cannot know the scope of the possible alternative brain states, within which any coherent continuous thought stream would reside, because materialism cannot tell us how thoughts are, or could be, generated in the brain or how many physical components would be required to produce them and represent them. But we do know that the super set of possible brain states is vast and the probabilities of landing on a specific sequence of brain states that might produce a specific series of coherent mental states would be very unkind to materialism’s brain-only hypothesis, if it could be done at all. Secondly, thoughts have no obvious material qualities at all and therefore cannot be quantified except by using a proxy calculation using symbolic language which would grossly understate the complexity involved and therefore be excessively charitable to materialism. But materialism would fail miserably nonetheless
NEO-DARWINISM
Absent an immaterial mind, materialism is left with the physical brain. The brain then has to account for everything we experience in our mental lives. This is an enormous burden. According to materialism, each quality of mind is underwritten by a physical process in the brain. The only explanation materialism has to offer as to how all these marvelous qualities of mind could have arisen (and arisen so quickly), is evolutionary theory–neo-darwinism. According to neo-darwinism each of these processes would have had to have been assembled piecemeal using the tandem mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. But there are serious problems with this that cannot be overcome, even in principle.
One obvious problem with an evolutionary accounting for the brain is that so many of the features and qualities of mind exhibit the signature of modern humanity. It is hard to accept that the brain could have been configured by evolution in the distant past to harbor a vast set of latent capabilities which when manifested would just happen to be useful in the context of 21st century humans. It is one thing to have the general capability for something but quite another thing to explain the specific causes that could bring forth vast quantities of novel, complex specified information spontaneously, continuously and near instantaneously and that offer value to modern humanity!
Secondly, in order for evolution to have produced a brain with the capabilities and qualities of mind we all experience, the physical processes which materialism purports gives rise to them in the brain would have to be encoded and stored in the DNA. These configurations might then be subject to “random mutational” changes such that they could be selected. However, the configurations for these processes cannot be identified or even inferred from the DNA. So where does all this complexity come from? And where is it stored? Think of it this way: If materialism is true and if science is the only pathway to truth, then it is reasonable to say that nature and in fact all reality is transparent to human reason. In effect, then, the brain could be said to have the capability of subsuming the complexity of all reality. Yet the complexity of the DNA–especially those more limited segments that produce the brain–is hopelessly insufficient to account for the total complexity of reality. Furthermore, this complexity would have had to have arisen throughout the lives of far too few individuals throughout the brief evolutionary period during which the descent of modern man is believed to have occurred.
SUMMARY
I have briefly sketched out the intractable difficulties of a materialist account involving the continuity of human thought. If any of this sounds at all plausible to you then let me suggest that you have been irreparably brainwashed by the scientism which has come to dominate Western academia.
If it is unreasonable to believe that these marvelous qualities of mind that we all experience continuously cannot be explained by an electro-chemical “machine” of sorts i.e. the brain, then we have to consider alternatives such as mind/brain dualism and dismiss materialism as a false hypothesis. And in fact it is unreasonable to believe that material processes in the brain could account for these qualities of mind. Setting aside the intractable difficulties in explaining how abstract thoughts are represented in the brain and rendered in consciousness or even what consciousness is, there is no reason to suspect that physical processes would have the foreknowledge to identify specific areas in the vastness of the brain that just happened to be readying themselves to produce a specific, coherent stream of thoughts that have meaning in human discourse. And there is also no reason to believe that it is likely or even possible for the brain–unaided by an immaterial mind–to arrange its components in such a way that it would generate a succession of complex, specified configurations continuously and unerringly throughout one’s life. These problems are fundamental and will not surrender to an entreaty to promissory materialism because foreknowledge and spontaneous generation of novel, continuous, complex, specified information is required and these cannot be accounted for by physical processes in the brain.
Let me close with a supreme example of human thought. To believe that the streams of thought Einstein must have experienced, as he sought the solution to the problems whose eventual resolution became a fundamental truth about reality–Relativity, happened as a result of continuous sequences of chance arrangements of molecular neural events, is such a draft on common sense that one would have to conclude–given the general acceptance of materialism–that any belief, no matter how foolish and no matter how contrary to direct human experience, could come to be accepted if wrapped in the sophistication of intellectualism and delivered with the full authority of science. One has to wonder at the irony as to how a method of inquiry–science–which has been spectacularly successful, with its intention to seek truth empirically through open rational inquiry, could lead us down a dead end path and become like that which it sought to counter–the tyranny of an overbearing institutional religion which itself had departed from its own charter.