Michael Egnor: Does your brain construct your conscious reality?
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk
Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors.
Part II Does your brain construct your conscious reality?
In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain
The brain understands nothing, imagines nothing, sees nothing. It wills nothing. We understand, we imagine, we see, and we will, using our brains.
See also: Can machines really learn? A parable of a book that learned Machine learning is a powerful and important tool that is likely to be of great value (and perhaps great risk) to man. Machines can be designed to change with time, but it is man, and only man, who learns.
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In part 2 Dr. Egnor states:
This inability of materialistic explanations, i.e. ‘the parts’, to account for the person, i.e. ‘the whole’, is now proven, via Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, to occur at a very low level.
In the following article, which extended Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to physics, and which is entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
To put Gödel’s incompleteness theorem much more simply, “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot (mathematically) prove”.
Simply put, materialistic explanations cannot account for context.
For example, Dawkin’s infamous Weasel phrase simply does not make any sense without taking its entire context into consideration
Likewise, we find this ‘context dependency’, which materialistic explanations cannot possibly account for, to be very much a part of how an organism develops.
In regards to what is providing the proper context for an organism, Talbott goes on to ask this simple, but rather profound, question: “the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Talbott also gives a partial answer to his question of “What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Talbott also stated: “after the fateful transition,,, Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.”
In short, it is immaterial information that is providing the proper context for an organism so as to explain “why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death.”
And this immaterial information is now shown, contrary to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, to be it’s own distinct physical entity that, although it is able to interact with matter and energy, has an existence that is completely separate from matter and energy.
The simplest way to demonstrate the physical independence of immaterial information is with quantum teleportation:
Here is a bit more technical explanation of the physical reality and independence of immaterial information (references on site):
The amount of “quantum” information ‘holding us together for precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer” is found to be enormous.
In the following video, it is noted that the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
The following video states that “There are 10^28 atoms in the human body.,, The amount of data contained in the whole human,, is 3.02 x 10^32 gigabytes of information. Using a high bandwidth transfer, that data would take about 4.5 x 10^18 years to teleport 1 time. That is 350,000 times the age of the universe.”
Also of note: quantum information is now found within molecular biology on a massive scale:
Moreover, it is also important to note that, due to quantum non-locality, quantum correlations require a beyond space and time cause in order to explain their effect:
In short, quantum information requires a beyond space and time cause.
Christians have a beyond space and time cause to appeal to. Darwinists don’t.
Besides providing direct empirical falsification of neo-Darwinian claims that say information is emergent from a material basis, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, or course, being the fact that we now have very strong physical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
As Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, “the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
From Part 1 of Egnor’s essay:
It is true that we use the word “triangle” to refer to two completely different types of entities:
1) Abstract geometric figures which do not exist physically
2) Things like drawings of triangles, which are approximate physical representations of abstract geometric figures
And as far I understand, computers can be programmed both to:
1) “reason” about abstract geometric figures including triangles (that is, to find proofs of theorems about triangles in Euclidean geometry)
2) identify representations of triangles in drawings and photographs
so it’s not clear to me that Egnor has (in this essay) identified particular abilities that only humans have.
as to:
LOL, your computer doesn’t know a triangle from a ham sandwich! And therefore certainly cannot ‘reason’ about triangles.
Moreover,,
The immaterial platonic realm of mathematics is simply inaccessible for materialistic explanations in general, and therefore is inaccessible for computers in particular:
As David Berlinski states in the following article,“There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time…. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects.”