New books on consciousness underscore naturalism’s fatal problem

@3 Seversky: "What’s left is often a representation of what’s there rather than what is actually there". Do you mean the Theory of Evolution? Truthfreedom

Seversky, ignoring your pointless questions, to this interesting one,

if we accept that quantum systems exist in a superposition of a great range of states, only collapsing into a single specific state when observed, what happens when such a system is observed simultaneously by a number of observers? Do they all see the same collapsed state and, if so, why? Given that the system can occupy a great range of states, why doesn’t it collapse into a different state for each observer at the same time?

I, and my "particular theistic beliefs", i.e. Christianity, are quite comfortable with the recent experimental confirmation of the Wigner's Friend thought experiment:

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

In fact, I, and my "particular theistic beliefs", i.e. Christianity, are quite comfortable with the entire range of quantum experiments that have recently been performed:

How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas

Verse:

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

bornagain77

Bornagain77@ 19

So he accepts consciousness as the primary fact of all possible facts? And for atheists to claim otherwise, i.e. that material comes first, leads to catastrophic epistemological failure? Great! Glad to see he is now a confessing Theist. Since you apparently also agree that consciousness must be primary, welcome to Theism to you as well. Finally an ounce of sanity from you guys.

Consciousness is primary in the sense that without it we would not be aware of anything, ourselves included. But, if consciousness precedes matter then what is consciousness being conscious of before the existence of anything to be conscious of? Bear in mind we have evidence from the use of sensory deprivation tanks that extended use can, according to the Wikipedia entry, result in "extreme anxiety, hallucinations,[2] bizarre thoughts, temporary senselessness, and depression.[3]" Sounds like it's not conducive to sanity. Also, if we accept that quantum systems exist in a superposition of a great range of states, only collapsing into a single specific state when observed, what happens when such a system is observed simultaneously by a number of observers? Do they all see the same collapsed state and, if so, why? Given that the system can occupy a great range of states, why doesn't it collapse into a different state for each observer at the same time? Quantum phenomena are undoubtedly extremely strange but they are far from supporting your particular theistic beliefs. Seversky

So he accepts consciousness as the primary fact of all possible facts? And for atheists to claim otherwise, i.e. that material comes first, leads to catastrophic epistemological failure? Great! Glad to see he is now a confessing Theist. Since you apparently also agree that consciousness must be primary, welcome to Theism to you as well. Finally an ounce of sanity from you guys.

"I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension." "..., I find this view antecedently unbelievable---a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense". Thomas Nagel - "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - pg.128 He goes toe-to-toe with science big wigs… and so far he’s undefeated. - interview Dr. Bernardo Kastrup: You see we always start from the fact that we are conscious. Consciousness is the only carrier of reality and existence that we can know. Everything else is abstraction; [they] are inferences we make from consciousness. http://www.skeptiko.com/274-bernardo-kastrup-why-our-culture-is-materialistic/ 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.,,, To make sense of this conundrum, we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, 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. Tegmark is correct in considering matter—defined as something outside and independent of mind—to be unnecessary baggage. But the implication of this fine and indeed brave conclusion is that the universe is a mental construct displayed on the screen of perception. Tegmark’s “mathematical universe” is inherently a mental one, for where does mathematics—numbers, sets, equations—exist if not in mentation? 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/ 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

bornagain77

ba, Bob did not say that "consciousness is ‘just a hypothesis’ and ‘certainly not a fact’". Read 14 again. hazel

Bob, will you ever recover from being Devastated? Should I send a care package of Pedialyte? You're in almost as bad a shape as Darwin, who's now been Destroyed! hundreds of times over. :-P DerekDiMarco

The devastating problem for Bob in his trying to hold that consciousness is 'just a hypothesis' and 'certainly not a fact', is that if consciousness were not the primary fact of all possible facts then there would be no other facts, much less would there be any possible hypothesis about facts.

“The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists." – Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177. “No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931 “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334. "In any philosophy of reality that is not ultimately self-defeating or internally contradictory, mind – unlabeled as anything else, matter or spiritual – must be primary. What is “matter” and what is “conceptual” and what is “spiritual” can only be organized from mind. Mind controls what is perceived, how it is perceived, and how those percepts are labeled and organized. Mind must be postulated as the unobserved observer, the uncaused cause simply to avoid a self-negating, self-conflicting worldview. It is the necessary postulate of all necessary postulates, because nothing else can come first. To say anything else comes first requires mind to consider and argue that case and then believe it to be true, demonstrating that without mind, you could not believe that mind is not primary in the first place." - William J. Murray

bornagain77

LoL! @ Bob- If it isn't a fact then it should be easy for Bob to demonstrate that. If all Bob has is his pathetic denial then no one should believe him. ET

However, failure to recognize the fact that matter and consciousness are playing on totally separate poles is actively leading in the wrong directions.

But that's not a fact. It's a hypothesis, but certainly not a fact. Bob O'H

Bob - The first thing that needs to be done is to *recognize* which pieces of reality are orthogonal to each other. I agree that this recognition is not the end of the matter. However, failure to recognize the fact that matter and consciousness are playing on totally separate poles is actively leading in the wrong directions. Note that science can progress without knowing how things interact. In fact, the biggest complaint lodged against Newtonian gravity at the time (from Leibniz no less, if I remember correctly) was that there was not mechanism for interaction. Should Newton have abandoned gravity because of this and tried to use the inert geometric approach of his colleagues instead? Or was the recognition that gravity played a role orthogonal to other types of dynamics an important point of progress in human reason? johnnyb

And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,

Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body - 2016 Abstract: Reported values in the literature on the number of cells in the body differ by orders of magnitude and are very seldom supported by any measurements or calculations. Here, we integrate the most up-to-date information on the number of human and bacterial cells in the body. We estimate the total number of bacteria in the 70 kg "reference man" to be 3.8·10^13. For human cells, we identify the dominant role of the hematopoietic lineage to the total count (?90%) and revise past estimates to 3.0·10^13 human cells. Our analysis also updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in the body is actually of the same order as the number of human cells, and their total mass is about 0.2 kg. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533

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 all the largest libraries in the world. Needless to say, "Someone" has been very busy making choices bringing our material bodies to a state that is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic paradigm, simply have no clue how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, much less how it might achieve a state that is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium.

Darwinism vs Biological Form - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w

As well Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose's work on how consciousness might "entangle" with the material brain, via Microtubules, has now also received experimental support,

Consciousness Depends on Tubulin Vibrations Inside Neurons, Anesthesia Study Suggests – 5-Sep-2017 Excerpt: The results provide a marked improvement to the Meyer-Overton correlation by discriminating anesthetics from non-anesthetics, and suggest that anesthetics block consciousness by altering terahertz oscillations in tubulin.,,, Senior co-author Jack Tuszynski said: “Scientific luminaries from Erwin Schrödinger to Sir Roger Penrose have proposed that consciousness requires quantum coherent processes, but skeptics have asserted such processes would suffer ‘decoherence’ in the ‘warm, wet and noisy’ biological milieu. Our study supports growing evidence that non-polar, pi resonance regions in microtubules and other biomolecules maintain these coherent states, and that a ‘quantum underground’ pervades the brain’s neurons.” https://www.newswise.com/articles/consciousness-depends-on-tubulin-vibrations-inside-neurons-anesthesia-study-suggests

Besides Microtubules, quantum coherence is now also found in 'a wide range of important biomolecules'

Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552

The implications 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, of course, being 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.”

Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe - Oct. 19, 2017 - Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” - Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - video (5:00 minute mark) https://www.disclose.tv/leading-scientists-say-consciousness-cannot-die-it-goes-back-to-the-universe-315604

Verse:

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

Thus, if Bob were actually curious about reality, instead of just trying to use his question, (e.g. how does consciousness interact with other base stuff?), about consciousness as a rhetorical gimmick against ID, Bob's question is actually very revealing in that recent advances in science, particularly advances in quantum information theory and in quantum biology, reveal very much to us as to how consciousness actually interacts "with other base stuff". Too bad that Bob shows no signs of ever being honest with the evidence, much less him being honest with himself and others. It is sad. Bob is not a complete idiot. You would think that he would eventually come around. Too bad, the consequences of Bob refusing to accept God are far more drastic than Bob, or anyone else, can possibly imagine right now.

Matthew 23:13 and 33 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.,,, “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

bornagain77

Bob O'Hara at post 9 asks,

(e.g. how does consciousness interact with other base stuff?).

Well if Bob were actually curious about reality, instead of just trying to use that question as a rhetorical gimmick against ID, Bob's question is actually very revealing. In the following video, Consciousness, specifically the mental attributes of 'the experience of the now' and of 'free will, are shown to have an extremely tight correlation with the experimental results from quantum mechanics

How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas

Moreover, as is touched upon in the following video,

Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology – Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSig2CsjKbg

,,, it was shown, via advances in quantum information theory, that "an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object's entropy is always dependent on the observer."

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy - June 1, 2011 Excerpt: In measuring entropy, 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. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

Moreover, in 2010 the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, which was originally devised by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, was finally experimentally realized. As the following paper highlights, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle's location and/or position converts information into energy.

Maxwell's demon demonstration 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

And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, 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.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. 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.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

Again to repeat that last sentence,“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.”,,, That statement about entropy being a property of an observer who describes the system, for anyone involved in the ID vs. Darwinism debate, ought to send chills down their scientific spine. Simply put, these developments go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validate a primary claim from ID proponents that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information into a biological system is necessary in order to circumvent the second law. As William Dembski himself stated in 1999, “It is CSI (Complex Specified Information) that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium”

“It is CSI (Complex Specified Information) that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium” William Dembki - Intelligent Design, pg. 159

And as David Abel stated in the following article, “A kinetic energy potential cannot be generated by Maxwell’s Demon from an ideal gas equilibrium without purposeful choices of when to open and close the partition’s trap door.”

MOVING ‘FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM’ IN A PREBIOTIC ENVIRONMENT: The role of Maxwell’s Demon in life origin - DAVID L. ABEL Abstract: Can we falsify the following null hypothesis? “A kinetic energy potential cannot be generated by Maxwell’s Demon from an ideal gas equilibrium without purposeful choices of when to open and close the partition’s trap door.” If we can falsify this null hypothesis with an observable naturalistic mechanism, we have moved a long way towards modeling the spontaneous molecular evolution of life. Falsification is essential to discount teleology. But life requires a particular version of “far from equilibrium” that explains formal organization, not just physicodynamic self-ordering as seen in Prigogine’s dissipative structures. Life is controlled and regulated, not just constrained. Life follows arbitrary rules of behavior, not just invariant physical laws. To explain life’s origin and regulation naturalistically, we must first explain the more fundamental question, “How can hotter, faster moving, ideal gas molecules be dichotomized from cooler, slower moving, ideal gas molecules without the Demon’s choice contingency operating the trap door?” https://www.academia.edu/9963341/MOVING_FAR_FROM_EQUILIBRIUM_IN_A_PREBIOTIC_ENVIRONMENT_The_role_of_Maxwell_s_Demon_in_life_origin

In other words, it is now experimentally shown that it is the free will choices of an intelligent agent that allows a system to bypass the second law and achieve a state that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium (such as the far from equilibrium state that we observe in life). The information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,

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. http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~angel/tsb/molecular.htm

,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. 'In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”

“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 Creation-evolution Controversy '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

Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.

Size Comparisons of Bacteria, Amoeba, Animal & Plant Cells Excerpt: Bacterial cells are very small - about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells. https://education.seattlepi.com/size-comparisons-bacteria-amoeba-animal-plant-cells-4966.html

bornagain77

As to:

“But surely our perceptions map in a mostly true way onto the real world, right? No, Hoffman says: He argues that Darwinian evolution would favor an organism with less-accurate perceptions over one that perceived the world as it really is. He calls this wildly counter-intuitive proposition, on which the rest of the book rests, the “fitness-beats-truth” (FBT) theorem; he says it can be proven through computer simulations.”

It is interesting that Hoffman, because he falsely believes that Darwinian evolution is undeniably true, erroneously believes that his work, via computer simulations of population genetics, proves that all his perceptions of reality must be unreliable and/or illusory. Yet what his work actually proves is that IF Darwinian evolution were true then all his perceptions would necessarily be unreliable and/or illusory. The irreconcilable problem for Darwinian theory from Hoffman's work is that reliable observation itself is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself:

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

In other words, since reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself, and yet, IF Darwinian evolution were true, there would be no reliable observation, then that necessary precludes Darwinian evolution from ever being based upon the scientific method. In other words, Darwinian evolution is 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. In the following extension of the delayed choice 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

And in the following experiment which demonstrated a violation of Leggett's inequality, it was found that "reality does not exist when we’re not observing it."

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality – Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell’s inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell’s inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics. Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization. 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

And this following subsequent experiment violated Leggett's inequality to a stunning 120 standard deviations:

Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system - Zeilinger 2011 Excerpt: Page 491: "This represents a violation of (Leggett's) inequality (3) by more than 120 standard deviations, demonstrating that no joint probability distribution is capable of describing our results." The violation also excludes any non-contextual hidden-variable model. The result does, however, agree well with quantum mechanical predictions, as we will show now.,,, https://vcq.quantum.at/fileadmin/Publications/Experimental%20non-classicality%20of%20an%20indivisible.pdf

Thus our observations of reality are experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics had predicted. In other words, yet another prediction of Darwinian evolution is, in over the top fashion, falsified yet again from the empirical evidence. As Richard Feynman stated: “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.”

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

Verse:

1 Thessalonians 5:21 but test everything; hold fast what is good.

Besides conscious observation becoming illusory and unreliable if Darwinian evolution were actually true, many other things necessarily become illusory within the Darwinist's materialistic worldview. Things that most people, including Darwinian atheist themselves, resolutely hold to be concrete and real.

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, (i.e. illusory), 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). Who, since beauty cannot be grounded within his materialistic worldview, must hold beauty itself to be illusory. Bottom line, nothing is truly real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, beauty, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, Darwinian Materialism and/or Methodological Naturalism vs. Reality – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaksmYceRXM

And as I stated yesterday, it would be hard to fathom a worldview that turns out to be more antagonistic towards modern science, indeed more antagonistic towards reality itself, than the presumption of methodological naturalism and/or Darwinian evolution has turned out to be. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/education/wealthy-scandinavian-benefactor-gives-us1-6-million-eqv-to-promote-id/#comment-687780 Bottom line, Darwinian evolution is not only NOT a real science, Darwinian evolution, and the materialistic presuppositions therein, are actually harmful to science (as well as being harmful to society at large). bornagain77

For the non-materialist, we have the option of adding consciousness to our list of “base stuff”.

And then what? That on its own doesn't solve the problem, it just defines it away, and creates more problems (e.g. how does consciousness interact with other base stuff?). Bob O'H

Consciousness cannot exist with Darwin's Theory. It has nothing to do with random mutations and nothing to do with strong dominating the weak. Human being are the only ones that have a conscious mind. It is not found anywhere else in nature. This is just one of several things that makes us unique. There are no court systems in nature, since an animal cannot commit a crime of any kind. When an animal kills another animal, even through cannibalistic means, that is simply nature being nature. Humans have a criminal code in place and do prosecute people for all sorts of crimes, including cannibalism. If we are no more than animals, then there should be no justice system at all. BobRyan

Seversky:

It’s not just a nat/mat problem, it’s everyone’s problem

Not really. Every philosophy can choose what it considers to be "base stuff". You actually don't have to explain your "base stuff". Otherwise, we would also have an equivalent problem of molecules. But we don't, because physicists have a pretty good understanding of what their "base stuff" looks like. The question is, can you explain consciousness solely on the account of the materialist's "base stuff"? For the non-materialist, we have the option of adding consciousness to our list of "base stuff". This is an option that the materialist, by definition, does not have. This is the problem with materialism - it hamstrings itself ahead-of-time for no apparent reason. Rather than going out and finding what is the base stuff, it just decides it already knows what it looks like. Non-naturalists, on the other hand, are free to use the evidence to decide which things are operating as "base stuff" and which things aren't. We aren't tied in ahead-of-time to a specific conception of what that base stuff looks like. johnnyb

seversky:

It’s not just a nat/mat problem, it’s everyone’s problem.. Whether you posit an intelligent designer or a god, you still face the problem of explaining how their consciousness works and how it originated,...

It's an a nat/mat problem because you have nothing and no hope. It is a non-starter. At least positing an Intelligent Designer sets us off on the right path to investigate. ET

Personally I don’t think Hoffman has anything to really explain consciousness to be honest with you, he just comes up with a good point that if evolution was the main guiding factor for consciousness it would most certainly build for fitness and not truth His theory doesn’t really explain the consciousness at all Michael Graziano’s Rethinking Consciousness I actually think his theories a little bit more important to address and deconstruct His bravado stating that his theory takes the wind from the sales of David Charmers Is relatively annoying I don’t see how he can say that an overseer program or processing can constitute any level of consciousness, I started reading AST, And I really didn’t see anything fascinating about this theory there was nothing that stood out and really explain much of anything that we already didn’t know I’m not exactly sure how we can answer David Chalmers heart problem with consciousness or why it would make it a meta-problem other than declaring that it was At one point I read that people just didn’t understand his theory he complained if I’m not getting this correct please correct me but from what I understand all his theory explains why we feel there is a subjective self it doesn’t explain the experience at all It’s another The consciousness is an illusion Because the brain has to be a computer because we said so, And I don’t see how an overseer program can become conscious because it’s surveying the rest of the processors underneath it Am I get this right? is this a theory that we should even concern ourselves with? It was actually kind of convoluted and very hard to read in comparison to almost every other theory I have read AaronS1978

This plays very nicely into Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism". The evolutionary argument against naturalism basically states, "if evolution is true and theism is false, we cannot know that evolution is true. The only way to be able to know if evolution is true is for theism (or some other non-naturalistic alternative) to also be true." The reason for this is the precise theorem that Hoffman states - in evolutionary competition, fitness beats truth. Therefore, if the orientation of our minds is from evolution, then we have no reason to trust it, which would include its thoughts about evolution. The only reason to trust the mind is if the mind were oriented by something that *did* have truth (and not a substitute like fitness) as a goal. Interestingly, Darwin got halfway to Plantinga's EAAN, but stopped short, probably because he didn't like what it implied.

But then 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. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Here he is talking about religious convictions, but his reasoning here does not limit the claim to only those types of convictions. Like most naturalistic philosophies, it doesn't bother to apply its own reasoning to itself. It pretends theism is true long enough to make the naturalistic claim, but the naturalistic claim pretends to show us why theism isn't true. However, logically followed, the naturalistic claim really just tells us that the naturalistic claim itself is non-sensical. johnnyb

As for Hoffman's book, judging by the interviews with him I've read, what he's basically arguing is that evolution has shaped our minds to work with the truth, just not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In other words, there's a whole lot of data about the world out there that's not essential to our survival so that gets filtered out. What's left is often a representation of what's there rather than what is actually there. For example, we see grass as green in color but that's just the way our mental model represents light of a certain wavelength that is being reflected off the plant. The only difference between that color and the other colors we see is a slight difference in the wavelengths. Or you could understand it as the difference between the cute animations of what goes on in a cell and what is actually happening inside one. My argument would be, however much is left out of the model and however much of what is kept in is a representation of what is there, if we exist in an objective reality which includes many threats to our existence then that mental model had better be fit for function. It may not be the absolute truth but it had better be true enough to enable us to survive. Seversky

It's not just a nat/mat problem, it's everyone's problem.. Whether you posit an intelligent designer or a god, you still face the problem of explaining how their consciousness works and how it originated, assuming you're still interested, of course. Seversky

Philosophers of earlier centuries didn't have trouble with this concept. Optical and audial illusions have been known forever, and philosophers have always known that the eye isn't like a telescope or a camera. Even within the framework of evolution there's no problem. Perception evolved to serve the purposes we need it to serve. If vision had evolved to be like a telescope or an electron microscope, it wouldn't have worked. polistra