Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor takes on a materialist neurologist

@2 AaronS1978: Absolutely stunning comment! :) @1 Seversky

Novella is essentially arguing, from the perspective of a professional neurologist, what I as a laymen have also claimed, namely that the world we perceive is a model or representation of what is actually out there.

Too bad you do not understand logic. Or there is another, worse option. How can you know about the accuracy of the "model of the world out there" IF you do not know exactly how that "world out there" is?Truthfreedom

February 3, 2020

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Needless to say, when an atheistic materialist claims that he is not really here making an argument in the first place, then it is VERY safe to assume that they are making a 'self' refuting argument in the most fundamental way possible. :)

Atheistic Materialism – Does Richard Dawkins Exist? – video 37:51 minute mark Quote: “It turns out that if every part of you, down to sub-atomic parts, are still what they were when they weren’t in you, in other words every ion,,, every single atom that was in the universe,, that has now become part of your living body, is still what is was originally. It hasn’t undergone what metaphysicians call a ‘substantial change’. So you aren’t Richard Dawkins. You are just carbon and neon and sulfur and oxygen and all these individual atoms still. You can spout a philosophy that says scientific materialism, but there aren’t any scientific materialists to pronounce it.,,, That’s why I think they find it kind of embarrassing to talk that way. Nobody wants to stand up there and say, “You know, I’m not really here”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCnzq2yTCg&t=37m51s

Besides personhood and perception both becoming illusory in the Darwinist's materialistic worldview, many other 'abstract' things, things that everyone including atheistic materialists consider to be undeniably real, become illusory too. "Abstract" things such as " tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice" and even mathematics.

What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? – M. Anthony Mills – April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html

Even the entire 'abstract' concept of species becomes illusory within the Darwinist's materialistic worldview:

Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: Denial of True Species Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes: “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder.,,, The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow. https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f

Thus for Charles Darwin to write a book entitled "Origin of Species" whilst at the same time, due to his reductive materialism, denying the existence of "true species" is obviously an exercise in self-refuting futility. Much like the atheist trying to argue that he does not really exist as a real person. Moreover, to make this dilemma even more devastating to the Darwinian materialists, it turns out that atoms themselves are not the solid indivisible concrete particles, as they were originally envisioned to be by materialists, but it turns out that the descriptions we now use to describe atoms themselves, the further down we go, dissolve into “abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.,,,”

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications By Bernardo Kastrup – March 25, 2019 Excerpt: according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we’ve realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.,,, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/

In fact, according to quantum theory, the most fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not even matter or energy at all, (as Darwinian materialists presuppose) but is immaterial information itself

“The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena.” Vlatko Vedral – Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of Wolfson College – a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics. “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” (48:35 minute mark) “In the beginning was the Word” John 1:1 (49:54 minute mark) Prof Anton Zeilinger speaks on quantum physics. at UCT https://youtu.be/s3ZPWW5NOrw?t=2984

Thus, in irony of ironies, not even the material particles themselves turn to be are ‘real’, (on a materialistic definition of what is ‘real’), but turn out to be "abstract" immaterial information. This puts the die-hard materialist in quite the conundrum because as Bernardo Kastrup further explains, to make sense of this conundrum of a non-material world of pure abstractions we must ultimately appeal to an immaterial mind. i.e. we must ultimately appeal to God!

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications By Bernardo Kastrup – March 25, 2019 Excerpt: “To make sense of this conundrum,,, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself.,,, Where we get lost and confused is in imagining that what we are describing is a non-mental reality underlying our perceptions, as opposed to the perceptions themselves. We then try to find the solidity and concreteness of the perceived world in that postulated underlying reality. However, a non-mental world is inevitably abstract. And since solidity and concreteness are felt qualities of experience—what else?—we cannot find them there. The problem we face is thus merely an artifact of thought, something we conjure up out of thin air because of our theoretical habits and prejudices.,,, As I elaborate extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World, none of this implies solipsism. The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/

Or to put it much more simply, as Physics professor Richard Conn Henry put it at the end of the following article, “The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.”

The mental Universe – Richard Conn Henry The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Excerpt: “The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.” – Richard Conn Henry is a Professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf

Of supplemental note: The Darwinian materialist, in his rejection of God, simply has no anchor for reality to grab onto:

As I have pointed out several times now, assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.

Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the reality of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Bottom line, nothing is real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, – Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – video – 39:45 minute mark https://youtu.be/8rzw0JkuKuQ?t=2387

Thus, although the Darwinist may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

bornagain77

July 5, 2019

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"the illusion that our brains evolved to have, a very compelling and persistent illusion – namely that the reality we perceive is real, rather than a constructed representation.” - Steven Novella - academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine

Novella can even appeal to the mathematics of population genetics to prove that if the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution is actually true, then all of our perceptions of reality must be illusory:

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? - Video - 9:59 minute mark Quote: “fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes.,,, Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it is fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality. Others see just part of the reality. And some see none of the reality. Only fitness. Who wins? Well I hate to break it to you but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality, but are just tuned to fitness, drive to extinction that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those (accurate) perceptions of reality go extinct. Now this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage?” https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY?t=601 The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality - April 2016 The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions. Excerpt: “The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/

The irresolvable problem for Novella and other Darwinian Materialists in holding that all our perceptions of reality are illusory is that it undermines the scientific method itself. That is to say, reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method.

Steps of the Scientific Method Observation/Research Hypothesis Prediction Experimentation Conclusion http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html

Thus, since Darwinian evolution denies ‘reliable observation’, and yet reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself, then Darwinian evolution can never be based upon the scientific method and is therefore falsified once again in its claim to be a scientific theory. Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics predicted for the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.

New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It – June 3, 2015 Excerpt: The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

Likewise, the following violation of Leggett's inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it.

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality - Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism." http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

Moreover, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.

More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) By Mindy Weisberger – March 20, 2019 Excerpt: “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”. https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html

Apparently empirical science itself could care less if Darwinian materialists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory! As Richard Feynman stated, "If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

The Scientific Method - Richard Feynman - video Quote: 'If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY

Moreover, it is not just our observations of reality that become illusory for the atheist. In the atheist's rejection of God as the anchor for reality, everything else also becomes illusory for the Darwinian atheist. In fact, in what I consider to be a shining example of poetic justice, in the atheist's claim that God does not really exist as a real person, the atheist himself ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person:

“You are robots made out of meat. Which is what I am going to try to convince you of today” Jerry Coyne – No, You’re Not a Robot Made Out of Meat (Science Uprising 02) – video https://youtu.be/rQo6SWjwQIk?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS1OmYcqv_yQSpje4p7rAE7-&t=20 The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness By STEVEN PINKER - Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness “(Daniel) Dennett concludes, ‘nobody is conscious … we are all zombies’.” J.W. SCHOOLER & C.A. SCHREIBER – Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection – 2004 “There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.” – A.Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10 etc.. etc.. etc..

bornagain77

July 5, 2019

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Neurophotonics and Biomedical Spectroscopy Nanophotonics 2019, Pages 189-213 9 - Quantum Processes in Neurophotonics and the Origin of the Brain's Spatiotemporal Hierarchy Travis J.A.Craddock, Philip Kurian, Jack A.Tuszynski, Stuart R.Hameroff DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-323-48067-3.00009-3

We review the brain's complex dynamical organization necessary for cognition and consciousness and conclude that, rather than a linear computer of neuronal synapses, the brain seems to function more as a nonlinear spatiotemporal hierarchy of interacting, dynamically layered systems. The brain's hierarchy apparently spans multiple layers covering at least 12 orders of magnitude reaching from large (nearly brain-wide, ?10 cm), relatively slow (<100 Hertz, “Hz”) processes based on neuronal membranes and synaptic network activities (e.g., electroencephalography, “EEG”), downward and inward to increasingly smaller and faster molecular scales inside neurons including kilohertz (103 Hz), megahertz (106 Hz), gigahertz (109 Hz), and terahertz (1012 Hz) dynamics of cytoskeletal filaments and their constituents at micrometer, nanometer and subnanometer size scales. These faster, smaller processes delve into biomolecular quantum states whose properties are suggested to offer solutions to questions related to cognition and consciousness, but also in the traditional view considered unlikely in the “warm, wet, and noisy” biological brain milieu. Here we contend that functional neurological quantum states—nontrivial in their manifestation at mesoscopic and macroscopic scales and possibly useful for signaling and information processing—can originate in either (1) photoexcited transition-state dipoles of aromatic networks, driven by endogenous photon emissions generated during aerobic processes, or (2) collective electronic behaviors due to van der Waals interactions in such aromatic networks, which can result in a hierarchical cascade of coherent oscillations spanning 12 or more orders of magnitude. Cognitive processing and consciousness may occur in this cascade due to nonlinear amplification of resonances among coherent brain states.

They’re trying hard to find a naturalistic explanation but so far they can just speculate. Ironically as more discoveries are published their goal turns more difficult to reach. But that doesn’t keep them from daydreaming. :)jawa

July 4, 2019

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Thank you sir!AaronS1978

July 4, 2019

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Aaron - use blockquote tags, i.e. [blockquote] ... [/blockquote] (without rather than [ and ])Bob O'H

July 4, 2019

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On an unrelated note Could somebody show me how to use the quote boxes. I just cut and paste these things and it doesn’t seem to give me an option for a quote box and I’m sure I’m going to feel stupid when I find outAaronS1978

July 4, 2019

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“Yale University neurologist Steven Novella posted recently on the science of growing brain tissue in the lab. It’s interesting stuff, but then we come to the jumbled metaphysical musings that conclude his post: There is a layer of weirdness to the very idea of brain tissue in a vat, because I think we are naturally uncomfortable with the very notion that our consciousness is the result of a clump of tissue shuttling ions around. It breaks the illusion that our brains evolved to have, a very compelling and persistent illusion – namely that the reality we perceive is real, rather than a constructed representation. That internal representation has a strong relationship to physical reality, but the two are not the same, and the relationship can break down in many ways (which give us weird glimpses behind the neurological veil). Anything that reduces all this to cellular activity, which we can see in a petri dish, just slaps us in the face with this reality. Of course, I think it’s best to just accept it and to fully understand our true nature than to persist in metaphysical delusions. STEVEN NOVELLA , “MAKING MINI-BRAINS FROM STEM CELLS” AT NEUROLOGICABLOG Consider Novella’s two main ideas: “[This is] the illusion that our brains evolved to have, a very compelling and persistent illusion – namely that the reality we perceive is real, rather than a constructed representation.” and “[This research] just slaps us in the face with this reality.” Novella refutes himself. He first asserts that everything he knows is an illusion. Then he insists that his illusions have slapped him in the face with reality. Goodness gracious. If everything we perceive is an illusion, then how can we “know” anything, including such ambitious knowledge as “everything we know is an illusion”? Novella senses this problem with his thesis and tries to elide it: “That internal representation has a strong relationship to physical reality…” But he can’t escape his house of mirrors quite so easily. If our perception is only of the representation and not of reality itself, how can we establish any “strong relationship to physical reality”? After all, any relationship to reality we perceive is itself just a perception too, equally disconnected from reality. We cannot test for reality because each test is itself a perception, which is an illusion no less than the perceptual illusion it tests. There’s no door marked EXIT from Novella’s hall of mirrors.” Here is what Novella said and Egnor’s criticism of it. I’m not seeing how he misrepresented it. Egnor using reductionism to show its absurdity. Hence his response. The reason why it is absurd is that each and everyone of your brain cells, the billions close to trillions of cells, that are in your head, had to evolve with the correct perception, each and every single one of them had to individually evolve and then correlate with each other to make your perception. Now what Egnor is getting at is if your reality is a reconstructed facsimile of what is really there then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to trust or to value anybody’s perception for any reason For example you’re an atheist you believe that you’re logical, you think that the information that you’ve received definitely proves that there is no god and you are in your justified reasoning. Similarly for your views on Christianity and the afterlife Now I will apply Novella’s reality to your perception You’re an atheist because a combination of brain cells glued together and made you an atheist, Your perception is a rough estimate of what is really going on, so your reasoning is not sound it’s just a rough Estimate, Everyone that you object to has no choice but to believe what they believe because they are also under the exact same influences you are. Because your perception is nothing more than a rough facsimile of what is actually going on around you, your conclusion that there is no God can be completely questioned. Your neurology can be completely distorted and not actually be picking up what reality is giving you. Logic logically does not exist because logic would require deducing information that your brain might not be able to deduce. This will apply to everything so science could not help you escape this as well because you have a perception that you have to interpret science with as well. The Blind leading the blind Arguing that there is no afterlife as you have brought up in your last post and saying that arguing against this perception of consciousness because it doesn’t support an afterlife is actually a strawman but that’s not where I’m going, What I am about to say is that your lack of a perception of the afterlife is due to the fact that your brain is not capable of perceiving it you just don’t have the neurology to do that so your claim that there is no afterlife is hollow because it is completely based off of personalize neurology that very well could be 100% wrong because it is in capable of perceiving that reality because the reality that your brain has constructed is an illusion This leads into the idea that you being your brain is under an illusion, So your consciousness which is an illusion is being deceived by your brain’s illusion This is Egnor house of mirrors So when you argue from your point of you, you must realize that if novella is right, your argument is moot just like my argument is moot and there’s no reason to argue. You were unfortunately suffering from an illusion no differently than I. Your opinion about God and spirituality is hollow and not valuable Because it could be the result of a few messed up wires in your brain or how the cells evolved in your brain. That’s not to say that I am not suffering from that as well, but I can say that the majority evolved that way so my perception might not be far off base. And saying that it’s nothing more than a survival advantage doesn’t get you out of that mess again that could be your brain messing with itself trying to alleviate the stress that it could be wrong furthermore again the comment is self are feuding, Believing in God and religion being a survival advantage speaks more to the fact that it is the right course of action then it does to the many tiny little benefits it might provide So this is a summery of what happens with novella’s logic. I see the color blue but you will never see the color blue because all you see is the color red but I also only can see the color blue and I will never see the color red as well. You say the color blue doesn’t exist I say it most certainly does, I didn’t say the color red doesn’t exist you say that I am not capable of perceiving the color red. All arguments then become useless The house of mirrors is an argument to show the absurdity of a constructed reality that isn’t tied to reality but only a rough estimate of it It undermines and invalidates everyone absolutely everyone and has nothing to do with life after death because how would you know you couldn’t perceive it anyways You just don’t have the neurology for it. And I’m not mocking you so you know it’s just that this train of thinking does get absurd and trying to describe it sounds like you’re being mockedAaronS1978

July 4, 2019

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Novella refutes himself. He first asserts that everything he knows is an illusion. Then he insists that his illusions have slapped him in the face with reality.

I'm not sure whether Egnor is deliberately misrepresenting Novella's argument - in other words, a strawman fallacy - or whether he genuinely does not understand what Novella is saying. No, Novella is not arguing that everything we perceive or know is an illusion in the sense implied by Egnor. Novella is essentially arguing, from the perspective of a professional neurologist, what I as a laymen have also claimed, namely that the world we perceive is a model or representation of what is actually out there. It is reconstructed from information acquired through our physical senses. When we see a red or a blue car, we now know that what is happening is that each car is coated in a paint which reflects slightly different wavelengths from the visible spectrum. The red and blue colors are how those wavelengths are represented in our mental models. As Novella points out, the value of such a model lies in how accurately it corresponds to what is actually out there. It doesn't have to be perfect but it does have to be good enough to enable us to navigate through and survive in that outside world. In other words, as Novella puts it:

… I think we are naturally uncomfortable with the very notion that our consciousness is the result of a clump of tissue shuttling ions around. It breaks the illusion that our brains evolved to have, a very compelling and persistent illusion – namely that the reality we perceive is real, rather than a constructed representation. That internal representation has a strong relationship to physical reality, but the two are not the same, and the relationship can break down in many ways (which give us weird glimpses behind the neurological veil).

As for the reality that is slapping us in the face, it is that this conscious model we all exist within emerges from the physical brain, an organ comprising billions of cells, some of which we can observe in a Petri dish. Obviously, this is utterly unacceptable to those who need to maintain a belief in a consciousness that can survive death and offer the prospect of immortality but it's just possible they may be wrong and it's better to come to terms with a material world.

Anything that reduces all this to cellular activity, which we can see in a petri dish, just slaps us in the face with this reality. Of course, I think it’s best to just accept it and to fully understand our true nature than to persist in metaphysical delusions.

Later, Egnor claims that Aristotle and Aquinas offer a better explanation for what we perceive

The correct understanding of perception was formulated by Aristotle and elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas.2 It is essential to any coherent understanding of the mind. When we perceive a real object, we grasp the actual form of the object with our mind, which is itself a form. Aristotle said it beautifully: “The mind is, in a way, all things.”

What he does not mention is that Aristotle thought consciousness and rational thought were located in the heart and Aquinas held that the faculties that make up consciousness were properties of an immaterial - and, as yet, undetected - soul. While both men undoubtedly made significant contributions to early thinking about these issues, they are hardly the last word. Unless you are trying to bolster a religious worldview of which survival of the self after death is an essential component.Seversky

July 4, 2019

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