Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne argues that consciousness is a mere byproduct of useful traits that are naturally selected and Michael Egnor takes issue with that:
The problem with Coyne’s spandrel/epiphenomenal hypothesis [about consciousness] is that even if the Darwinian mechanism (“survivors survive”) were a meaningful scientific inference, it can only explain the survival of consciousness, not the arrival of consciousness. To figure at all in evolution, consciousness must first exist and the Darwinian mechanism can’t explain its origin. At best, Darwinism can only explain changes in consciousness over time.
Furthermore, if human consciousness did indeed “evolve,” it had to be present in some way in inanimate matter as a substrate on which natural selection could act. Thus, the assertion that consciousness “evolved” is either empty (it doesn’t explain the arrival of consciousness, only its survival) or it presupposes panpsychism—the presence of consciousness in inanimate matter. Panpsychism is anathema to materialists like Coyne, who desperately try to eliminate Mind from nature.
Michael Egnor, “Did consciousness evolve?” at Mind Matters News
Here are some of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s earlier reflections on consciousness:
Can we engineer consciousness in a robot? One neuroscientist thinks we need only “simple guidelines.” His underlying assumptions are just wrong
Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the p-zombie. A p-zombie (a philosopher’s thought experiment) behaves exactly like a human being but has no first-person (subjective) experience. The meat robot violates no physical principles. Yet we KNOW we are not p-zombies. Think what that means.
Did consciousness “evolve”? One neuroscientist doesn’t seem to understand the problems the idea raises. Darwinian evolution must select physical attributes. If consciousness evolved as a mere byproduct of physical brain processes, it is powerless in itself. Thus Graziano’s theories of consciousness are themselves mindless accidents.
and
Did consciousness evolve to find love? It’s an attractive idea but it comes with a hidden price tag If consciousness is a mere tool of human sexual selection, it is mere plumage, a pretty enticement, of no meaning or import otherwise. But then what becomes of Dr. Graziano’s own intellectual labors?
Also: Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness cannot have evolved. How many joules of consciousness would make you a human instead of a chimpanzee? How many more joules of consciousness would make you a genius? Computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup argues that evolution deals with things that can be measured quantitatively but consciousness cannot be quantified.
Interesting.
As to this comment from Dr. Egnor:
Panpsychism, i.e. postulating ‘the presence of consciousness in inanimate matter’, still does not resolve the problem of consciousness for evolutionists.
It seems fairly obvious to me that, at the origin of the universe, panpsychists suffer an even bigger conundrum than Darwinian materialists do, in explaining the origin of consciousness, since panpsychists have already conceded the existence of consciousness at the origin of the universe itself. For panpsychists to be able to give an adequate explaination for the origin of all those, (10^80), conscious particles at the origin of the universe, then panpsychists are forced to postulate a cause, i.e. God, that is sufficient within itself to explain the effect in question, i.e. namely, a universe full of. (10^80), conscious particles.
Thus, whilst panpsychists apparently believe that they may have the upper hand on Darwinian materialists in explaining the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, in that they claim consciousness is already present in the elementary particles, never-the-less, their supposed solution turns around and bites them big time at the origin of the universe itself.
Although that argument against panpsychism seems fairly obvious to me, this argument against panpsychism, (and materialism), can be made much more rigorous.
And here are eight lines of empirical evidence from quantum mechanics that proves that consciousness, i.e. the Mind of God, must precede material reality.
And although it would be easy enough to falsify materialism and/or panpsychism by merely appealing to the falsification of ‘realism’ by Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment and Leggett’s inequality,,
,, although it would be easy enough to falsify materialism and/or panpsychism by merely appealing to the falsification of ‘realism’ by Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment and Leggett’s inequality, a more direct way of falsifying Darwinian evolution altogether, and proving that consciousness cannot possibly be a epi-phenomena of material reality (Coyne), or a intrinsic property of material reality (panpsychism, Goff), is by appealing to Quantum Zeno effect and Quantum Information theory. This is because the Quantum Zeno effect and Quantum Information theory deal directly with entropy.
First off, entropy is, by a VERY wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose himself stated, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
And yet, although entropy is very fundamental to our mathematical descriptions of the universe,
And yet, although entropy is very fundamental to our mathematical descriptions of the universe, in the quantum Zeno effect we find that “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
Atheists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment (and/or ‘decoherence’) is sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect. Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheists may feel about it, is now experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation. And thus the original wikipedia statement of, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay”, stands as being a true statement.
On top of the Quantum Zeno effect, in quantum information theory we find that “one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
And as the following article states, “Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
If the statement “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”, does not send chills down your scientific spine then you are not paying attention!
If I, as a person, am supposedly a purely material being, as Darwinists hold that I am, then why in blue blazes should the finely tuned, and purely material, entropic actions of the universe even care if I am observing them or not, or that I might be describing a system? This simply makes no sense whatsoever unless consciousness really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is.
To state the glaringly obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly to a Mind First, and/or to a Theistic view of reality in which it is held that consciousness precedes all of material reality.
Moreover, it is important to note that one of the main reasons that Darwinian evolution fails to qualify as a rigorous science is because there is no ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for mathematicians and physicists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon.
As Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated. “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
In fact, not only is there no ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for Darwinists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science, almost directly contradicts the primary Darwinian claim that greater and greater levels of functional complexity can easily be had and/or ‘naturally selected’ for over long periods of time. Indeed, entropy’s main claim is that, over long periods of time, everything in the universe will decay into simpler and simpler states until what is termed thermodynamic equilibrium is finally reached.
And yet, although Darwinian evolution almost directly contradicts the main principle behind entropy, if not directly contradicts it,
And yet, although Darwinian evolution almost directly contradicts the main principle behind entropy, if not directly contradicts it, we find that life is far from being anywhere near thermodynamic equilibrium.
The positional information that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be on the order 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells in the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within the books of the largest libraries in the world.
As should be obvious, that is massive amount of information that cannot possibly be contained within the DNA of an organism,
As the following article states, 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.
So just where is this massive amount of ‘positional’ information coming from in a developing embryo if it cannot possibly be contained within the DNA of the fertilized egg of a human?
Well, at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into multiple different states during embryological development.
Moreover, as the following video highlights, there is now found to be a massive amount of non-local, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement and/or quantum information within the molecular biology of living organisms.
The thing about quantum entanglement that is so interesting is that it requires a ‘non-local’ cause that is beyond space and time. As the following article states, ““Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, (via the non-locality of quantum information and/or the non-locality of quantum entanglement ), has, for all intents and purposes, finally achieved experimental confirmation.
Darwinists simply have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to in order to be able to explain where this massive amount of positional and/or quantum information could possibly be coming from in a developing embryo. Whereas, on the other hand, Christians have postulated a beyond space and time cause all along.
On top of all that, quantum information is physically conserved and therefore cannot be created nor destroyed,,,
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication is, of course, the fact that we now have very strong empirical 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 article, 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:
Supplemental note:
@ BA77 #3
Your last few paragraphs put me in mind of this quote of the late Robert Jastrow, astronomer at NASA :
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
? Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers
Which is it, jerry?
Does this guy have a clue?
Some reading that could benefit coyne:
Yoran Gutfreund.
Departament of Neurobiology, The Rappaport Research Institute and Faculty of Medicine, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6117425/#!po=53.0303
An amusing and virtuoso bit of philosophy from the animator and author of the Brief Outlines vlog (dedicated to expounding Owen Barfield) is a video about the sad fate of a materialist philosopher called Zarathustra (with a luxuriant moustache suspiciously reminiscent of Nietzsche!).
It also forms a preliminary to Rudolf Steiner’s (excellent) PhD thesis Truth and Knowledge.
http://charltonteaching.blogsp.....f.html?m=1
Bernardo Kastrup has replied to coyne. He refers to him as the: “dim-witted biologist”. I totally agree 🙂
He also says something about coyne’s illiteracy (philosophically speaking, of course):
Worth every paragraph.
Dim-witted biologist: consciousness is accidental.