A Progressive Auto-da-fé

_{Barry Arrington

April 21, 2018

Intelligent Design}

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Long time readers know we have occasionally indulged in Sam Harris fricassée in these pages. See here, here and here for examples. Harris is one of the leading proponents of the “consciousness is an illusion” school, which means he denies the Primordial Datum – the one thing that everyone (including Sam Harris) knows for a certain fact to be true — that they are aware of their own existence. That said, we will be the first to admit there is an integrity – of a sort – to Harris’ silliness. He understands that his materialism precludes, in principle, the existence of immaterial consciousness, and so he denies consciousness exists. Yes, I know, it is gobsmackingly stupid. But at least it is an honest sort of stupidity.

Unsurprisingly, Harris is an uber-progressive, but, as Kyle Smith at NR reports, Harris’ integrity has landed him in hot water with his fellow progressives, especially Ezra Klein:

Klein’s site Vox, in a piece by scientists Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, merely tagged Harris as participating in “pseudoscientific racialist speculation” and peddling “junk science” while being “egregiously wrong morally” and implied he’s on the same side as eugenicists, claiming that the burden of proof is on Harris to demonstrate that he isn’t. The piece was listed as one of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hatewatch headlines” of the day, right alongside news about neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Klein himself then chimed in with an attack piece saying Harris was carrying on with “America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” All of this because Harris had a podcast conversation with Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, which contains a chapter about race and IQ.

Klein is a high priest of progressivism, and like most such he holds progressive orthodoxies with a blinkered and hidebound dogmatism that would have made Torquemada blush. Harris allows Murray a platform to express views challenging a progressive orthodoxy? To the stake! Fortunately for the rest of us, Klein has no access to a literal stake, so he burns Harris metaphorically in the pages of Vox. And for a progressive like Harris, that may be almost as painful as the real thing.

Comments

Sev:
Such as?
Seriously? Why do you think they call it a "hard problem" Sev?Barry Arrington_{April 22, 2018
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jdk, for a 'stupid' repetitive argument, it sure seems to have ruffled your trollish feathers. If it is so stupid why not just ignore it as I do with so many of your incoherent arguments? Why even bother responding to a self-evidently 'stupid' argument? Might I suggest that you have lashed out at me precisely because you know that you can't coherently answer the argument. And ad hominem is basically all you have got left??? You see jdk, you can lie to yourself, and you can lie to others, but you can't lie to the logic behind that argument, nor can you lie to the logic (and/or math) behind any of the other arguments for ID! Thus you have apparently resorted to hostile emotion instead of logic since logic is now off the table for you! Children act much the same way when they get frustrated.bornagain77_{April 22, 2018
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What a repetitive, stupid argument that ba is enamored of.jdk_{April 22, 2018
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One problem with you 'consciousness is a model' theory Sev. You see Sev, I'm sure that I really exist. But I am not sure that you, as an atheistic materialist, really exist. According to 'your' atheistic materialism, 'you' are just a neuronal illusion. Making all sorts of random noises, pops, whistles, glurbs, burps, and what not, that are all caused, with no rhymne or reason, by the random jostingly of the atoms of 'your' brain. (As if there is a real 'you' to possess a brain in the first place in 'your' atheistic worldview). Sev, And herein lies the problem with 'your' model of consciousness on atheistic materialism. I have no access to 'your' inner subjective awareness. i.e. Access to see if 'you' really are in control of 'your' thoughts and motions. So how am I to know for 100% fact that 'you' really exist as a real person and that 'you' are not just some type of consciously dead zombie going through the motions of having a personal subjective conscious experience? Can 'you' scientifically prove to me that 'you' really exist? If 'you' can't prove it to me, I will have to take 'your' atheistic 'illusion' model of consciousness at face value and hold 'you' to be a consciously dead zombie that is making all sorts of incoherent noises. i.e. pops, whistles, glurbs, burps, and what not,,, and consider all 'your' incoherent ramblings as so much background noise that is to be ignored and/or muffled. I look forward to reading "your' peer reviewed paper, with many co-authors no less, proving that 'you' really are having a personal subjective conscious experience.. :)bornagain77_{April 22, 2018
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bornagain77 @ 17
1. If consciousness is a model it is merely a imitation of reality
No, it is a partial representation of reality based on the limited amount of data our senses are able to acquire about it.
2. Consciousness is necessary to perceive reality.
We perceive the model, not reality itself.
3. Consciousness can not be a imitation of reality if it is necessary to perceive reality.
On my view, the world we live in on a day-to-day basis is a VR construct something like what we saw in The Matrix. It's all we have.
4. Consciousness is not a model.
I think it is. What is your alternative?Seversky_{April 22, 2018
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William J Murray @ 16
Seversky says “consciousness is a model” as if that is somehow more explanatory or descriptive than “consciousness is a pattern of firing neurons” or “consciousness is an emergent property of chemical interactions”. What is using the map? What is observing and experiencing the map? What makes adjustments to the map, recognizes and corrects errors?
Exactly, the model version of consciousness doesn't solve the hard problem any better than other versions but to me it ties in to what we have learnt about how our senses gather data, 'encode' it and transmit it into the brain for further processing. The best I can offer is that I don't see consciousness as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. For example, I am convinced that my cats are conscious but their model is not the same as mine. Their senses are balanced differently. They rely more on smell than vision, for example. On the other hand, they can't speak as we do, although they find other ways of communicating their needs quite effectively. And I very much doubt that they can reason logically, calculate or think in abstracts the way we can. What I wonder I whether consciousness is something that has evolved slowly over time from very simple beginnings into increasingly sophisticated and complex forms of which we are the most recent iteration. And the obvious question for dualists is if we can acquire information about the world through extrasensory means why bother going to the trouble and expense of evolving a complex brain and sensory apparatus?
“[Once you discount all the evidence to the contrary,]
Such as?Seversky_{April 22, 2018
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I have been thinking about the differences between the 21st Century secular progressive movement and the early 20th Century version. At least for 20th Century progressive movement (which was just as secular or atheistic as the current version) there was some kind of foundation in natural law, though it was naturalistic/ materialistic version of natural law. For example, the justification for the eugenics movement was that civilization and compassionate Christian morality made the human stock inferior by allowing inferior classes of people to breed. The survival of the fittest effect from Darwinian natural selection, their argument went, would have naturally resulted in humans becoming more and more fit by weeding out the weak and undesirable. Eugenics would correct this by scientifically breeding a better human stock. Here is how eugenicist, John H. Bell, justified the movement in 1929:
The idea of eugenics is perhaps as old as the written history of the human race. The word itself being derived from the Greek eugenos, meaning well-born. The Spartans, as you will recall, practiced a form of eugenics scarcely tolerable to-day; and crude and cruel though it was, it seems to have been the thing that enabled them to develop a remarkably heroic race; the weaklings in their young citizenry were eliminated by putting all children through such physical hardships that only the fit survived. The Romans also made attempts at racial improvement by casting their defective infants into the River Tiber or leaving them upon the mountainside to starve. And so the idea of elimination, by one way or another, of those who were expected to be disqualified for a certain standard of physical and mental perfection, has come down to us through a great space of time, and persists as strongly in the minds of people to-day as it did in the minds of the ancient Spartans and Romans. Traces of these earlier efforts to preserve a healthy race may be found in the laws of Lycurgus, and in the present age somewhat similar customs are said to have existed among the South-Sea Islanders and also amongst a tribe of North American Indians, who were distinguished for their intelligence, strength, and physical beauty.
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Justifying_Eugenics_Excerpts_from_John_Hendren_Bell_sThe_Biological_Relationship_of_Eugenics_to_the_Development_of_the_Human_Race_1930 Of course this also led to a not so subtle forms of racism, which contemporary progressives rightly eschew. Thus Woodrow Wilson, once an icon of progressivism is now viewed with utter disdain. However, paradoxically Margaret Sanger for some reason is still given a free pass. The irony is that the “old” secular progressives would have considered so-called transgenderism as abnormal because it was unnatural. They would have sterilized transgender adults. By contrast, contemporary secular progressives argue transgenderism is normal then castrate and mutilate transgender boys and girls. Has anyone discovered a transgender gene? Or, is it all environmental? But if it’s environmental that would mean it’s changeable. So what would be morally wrong with using therapy to help transgender people change their orientation? Why is transgenderism now being promoted as an absolute right? My point it that at least old progressives, however distorted their thinking may have been, at least tried to make an appeal to “natural law” (again, it was a completely Godless form of natural law.) The so called new progressivism make no appeal to natural law at all. Transgenderism, for example, appears to be a totally made up and artificial idea. I don’t see that this kind of thinking has any rational basis at all, let alone any basis in “settled science.”john_a_designer_{April 22, 2018
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Seversky @ 6, Jonathan Haidt, a sociological researcher, has broken political/social belief in the US down into five or six spectra. Progressives and conservatives are at opposite ends, naturally. (He is, by the way, a self-described secular liberal. That's significant, for what he has found surprised him.) He has found that progressives only think along 3 of the spectra. Conservatives think along all 5 or 6 of them. He once had conservatives take his test, but attempting to pose as liberals. They had no difficulty simulating liberal thought. Then he had liberals attempt to think like conservatives. They were unable to do so. This explains why conservatives view progressives as simple-minded or uneducated, whereas liberals think of conservatives as crazy and dangerous: they simply can't fully comprehend conservativism. Therefore, it appears (from his research anyway) that conservatives are the more intellectually-developed. You can start looking into Haidt's findings here: https://www.edge.org/conversation/what-makes-vote-republicanEDTA_{April 22, 2018
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As to the materialistic claim that: “consciousness is a model” 1. If consciousness is a model it is merely a imitation of reality. 2. Consciousness is necessary to perceive reality. 3. Consciousness can not be a imitation of reality if it is necessary to perceive reality. 4. Consciousness is not a model.bornagain77_{April 22, 2018
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Seversky says "consciousness is a model" as if that is somehow more explanatory or descriptive than "consciousness is a pattern of firing neurons" or "consciousness is an emergent property of chemical interactions". What is using the map? What is observing and experiencing the map? What makes adjustments to the map, recognizes and corrects errors? Conciousness = map/model still means that the experience of top-down, free will oversight is an illusion - the model would be generating a sort of an experiential hallucination that the observer is independent of and observing the map and has top-down oversight. Seversky said: "...all the evidence indicates that it does not exist apart from the brain." Let me fix that: "[Once you discount all the evidence to the contrary,] ... all the evidence indicates it does not exist apart from the brain."William J Murray_{April 22, 2018
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groovamos @ 12
I guess love and gratitude for existence, or a sense of identity for that matter, or dreams of any kind of ethereal nature are other than consciousness or maybe unconsciousness. Not being based on sensory “data”.
What makes you think that all those phenomena are not based on sensory data?Seversky_{April 22, 2018
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Barry Arrington @ 8
Just so we are clear here Sev, are you disagreeing with your boy Sam Harris? He says:
After reading The Bell Curve, though, he came to think that Murray “was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime” because “the most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science.”

Yes, I disagree with Harris about this.Seversky_{April 22, 2018
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Good stuff, BA77. Thank you.Truth Will Set You Free_{April 21, 2018
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In my view it [consciousness] is a model of what is out there, including ourselves, based on sensory data. I guess love and gratitude for existence, or a sense of identity for that matter, or dreams of any kind of ethereal nature are other than consciousness or maybe unconsciousness. Not being based on sensory "data". I wonder if "sensory data" can be proven to exist. In other words measured, as naturalism would require.groovamos_{April 21, 2018
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Well Doubter, Alzheimer's is indeed a very sad disease, but the evidence you cite is not nearly enough to establish that material mind can generate immaterial mind and immaterial thoughts. Only enough to cast a very faint shadow of "doubt", as your name directly implies, on the multiple lines of solid evidence I have thus far presented. So to directly counter your fairly weak claim that "I" really is destroyed by Alzheimer's I will cite the following:
Do Alzheimer’s, Dementia Prove the Soul Doesn’t Exist? - Tara MacIsaac - September 2, 2014 Excerpt: Occasionally, just before death, people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia who’ve been completely incoherent for many years will seem to return suddenly to their senses. Their memories, personality, and entire mind—so long shrouded by the disease that loved ones had lost hope of their return—shine forth in a final blaze. This phenomenon is known as terminal lucidity. Some say it refutes the philosophical argument that the “soul” is merely a function of the brain. The late philosopher Paul Edwards made his “Alzheimer’s Argument Against the Soul” in 1995.,,, Batthyany said that Edwards makes an “intuitively compelling” argument. But terminal lucidity may suggest the mind is not destroyed with the brain, Batthyany said. If the mind were dependent on parts of the brain for existence, it is hard to see how a whole person—a person who can make connections between this memory and that, a person who can calmly and rationally interact with others and perform coherent actions—could return. If parts of the brain were so badly affected by the disease, one would expect only a fragmented individual to remain. https://www.theepochtimes.com/do-alzheimers-dementia-prove-the-soul-doesnt-exist_930465.html Alexander Batthyany - Terminal Lucidity: Preliminary Data 2014 - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et0AwKSWwsw One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity - Nov. 24, 2014 I'm as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I've had to "quarantine," for lack of a better word, a few anomalous personal experiences that have stubbornly defied my own logical understanding of them. Excerpt:,,, terminal lucidity. Let’s have a more detailed look at the phenomenon in question. The term was coined only five years ago by German biologist Michael Nahm. His 2009 article in The Journal of Near-Death Studies was the first modern review article on the curious subject of cognitively impaired people becoming clearheaded as their death approaches. According to him, cases of “terminal lucidity” had been recorded for millennia, from accounts by classical scholars such as Hippocrates, Cicero and Plutarch to 19th-century medical luminaries like Benjamin Rush (who wrote the first American treatise on mental illness). It’s just that, apparently, no one had thought to label or conceptualize these elusive incidents in any formal way before. Here’s how Nahm defined terminal lucidity in that original article: "The (re-)emergence of normal or unusually enhanced mental abilities in dull, unconscious, or mentally ill patients shortly before death, including considerable elevation of mood and spiritual affectation, or the ability to speak in a previously unusual spiritualized and elated manner." The author characterizes terminal lucidity as one of the more common, but lesser known, ELEs (or “end-of-life experiences”). Others on his list include deathbed visions, apparitions, near-death/out-of-body experiences, telepathic impressions, and so on.,,, Of 49 case studies of terminal lucidity, the vast majority (84 percent) occurred within a week of death; 43 percent, in fact, transpired the final day of life. They divide the phenomenon into two general classes, however. In the first subtype, “the severity of mental derangement improve[s] slowly in conjunction with the decline of bodily vitality.” This occurs in some patients with chronic mental illness when their psychiatric symptoms become less pronounced, or disappear altogether, starting around a month before their deaths. Thus, the lucid periods emerge gradually, like clouds parting. The authors offer three Russian case studies from the 1970s as examples, all schizophrenic patients “without prior lucid intervals, living in seemingly stable psychotic mental states for many years.” One man who’d been completely catatonic for nearly two decades allegedly “became almost normal” before he finally passed away. In the second subtype of terminal lucidity, the authors tell us, “full mental clarity can appear quite abruptly and unexpectedly just hours or days before death.” In one study, 70 percent of caretakers in a British nursing home said they’d personally observed people with dementia becoming lucid shortly before their deaths.,,, A 92-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, hadn’t recognized her family for years, but the day before her death, she had a pleasantly bright conversation with them, recalling everyone’s name. She was even aware of her own age and where she’d been living all this time. “Such incidents happen regularly,” write Nahm and Greyson. ,,, for cases involving obvious brain damage (such as strokes, tumors, advanced Alzheimer’s disease) that should render the patient all but vegetative, not functioning normally, it’s a genuine medical mystery. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/one-last-goodbye-the-strange-case-of-terminal-lucidity/
bornagain77_{April 21, 2018
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Seversky Conservatism and progressivism are not opposites, so the effort would be wasted. Conservatism is merely the trailing edge of the progressive-driven Overton Window, and conservatives tomorrow will champion the progressive position in the battles they lose today. That's conservatism's purpose; to lose to liberal/progressives while maintaining the illusion of opposition. Consiousness may not be an illusion but conservative opposition to progressivism is nothing but illusion. It's turtles all the way down ...ScuzzaMan_{April 21, 2018
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BA77 at 2: "Moreover, as Wilder Penfield and others have demonstrated, the person of “I” simply is not reducible to brain states" I would like to believe that, but Penfield's work and the split-brain cases don't involve damage to the brain as extensive as happens in Alzheimer's. From https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-happens-brain-alzheimers-disease : "In Alzheimer’s disease, (neural) damage is widespread, as many neurons stop functioning, lose connections with other neurons, and die. Alzheimer’s disrupts processes vital to neurons and their networks, including communication, metabolism, and repair. At first, Alzheimer’s disease typically destroys neurons and their connections in parts of the brain involved in memory, including the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus. It later affects areas in the cerebral cortex responsible for language, reasoning, and social behavior. Eventually, many other areas of the brain are damaged. Over time, a person with Alzheimer’s gradually loses his or her ability to live and function independently. Ultimately, the disease is fatal." It seems that in these cases the brain is damaged so severely that the inner personal "I" really is also badly damaged, as if it really were a function of the physical brain. It's hard to see how the human sense of self, the inner "I" (to say nothing about the unique personality), in order to stay intact doesn't require a functioning memory - memories of previous life and also of recent events, ability to communicate through language, and how to behave. I wonder if there have been any studies of this aspect of the effects of Alzheimer's. There are many anecdotal accounts of Alzheimer's victims progressing to the point where "the person just isn't there any more".doubter_{April 21, 2018
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Sev,
You might also be interested in this article which is heavily critical of some of the data Murray relies on in his book.
Just so we are clear here Sev, are you disagreeing with your boy Sam Harris? He says:
After reading The Bell Curve, though, he came to think that Murray “was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime” because “the most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science.”
Barry Arrington_{April 21, 2018
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You might also be interested in this article which is heavily critical of some of the data Murray relies on in his book.Seversky_{April 21, 2018
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Let me say that, as an a/mat, I flatly disagree with Harris and other atheists who describe consciousness as an illusion. In my view it is a model of what is out there, including ourselves, based on sensory data. The model is incomplete because of the limitations of our sensory channels but it is no more an illusion than a map or aerial photograph of some territory. Exactly how it is created from the natural processes in the physical brain is the notorious "hard problem" but all the evidence indicates that it does not exist apart from the brain. I have one question: could someone list, say, five or ten beliefs which define conservatism and the same number which, in their view, define progressivism. I just wonder of the dichotomy is as black-and-white as some people think.Seversky_{April 21, 2018
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It’s sad to see this. Unlike celeb physicist Larry Krauss, one gets the impression that Sam Harris is a nice nerd who just doesn’t get what it means to be a progressive. Being a pure naturalist atheist is one thing; it does not necessarily entail an immediate all-out war with reality. But being a progressive does mean waging an all-out war with reality. The progressive tries to force other human beings to be what they are not and cannot be, and turns on everyone in sight when it does not work. That would include turning on Sam Harris, unfortunately. There is an instructive recent photo of a confrontation at a coffee shop making the rounds: Why on earth would the yell-ee at a very short distance from the megaphone want anything to do with progressivism? You would think that - as a Starbucks employee - he might well be in principle, a fan, but one wonders what people like him are thinking now. Such doubt will only enrage the progressive more… We are lucky if the progressive joins the horde rushing off a cliff into the sea before pushing many others over, as happened so many times in the last century.News_{April 21, 2018
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To further drive the point home that the entire concept of ‘personhood’ will forever be beyond the scope of reductive materialistic explanations, it is good to remember Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems can be stated simply as such, “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”
“Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (1931), proves that there are limits to what can be ascertained by mathematics. Kurt Gödel (ref. on cite), halted the achievement of a unifying all-encompassing theory of everything in his theorem that: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”. Thus, based on the position that an equation cannot prove itself, the constructs are based on assumptions some of which will be unprovable.” Cf., Stephen Hawking & Leonard Miodinow, The Grand Design (2010) @ 15-6
Gödel went on to state this in regards to the implications of his incompleteness theorems for reductive materialism.
“In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind.,,, Mind is separate from matter.” Kurt Gödel – Hao Wang’s supplemental biography of Gödel, A Logical Journey, MIT Press, 1996. [9.4.12]
Gödel incompleteness theorems have now been extended to physics and now prove that the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution will forever lack the explanatory power to be able to explain why any particular organism may take the basic macroscopic form that it takes:
Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics – December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, “We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s,” added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. “So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.” http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html Darwinism vs Biological Form – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w
That is to say that, in order to explain why any particular organism may take the specific form that it does, it is necessary to go beyond the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution and, via Gödel, posit “a soul or a mind”. Moreover, positing a soul answers the simple, but profound, question of what is it exactly that keeps the trillions of cells of our material body from disintegrating “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer”
The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings – Stephen L. Talbott – 2010 Excerpt: Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. ,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? Despite the countless processes going on in the cell, and despite the fact that each process might be expected to “go its own way” according to the myriad factors impinging on it from all directions, the actual result is quite different. Rather than becoming progressively disordered in their mutual relations (as indeed happens after death, when the whole dissolves into separate fragments), the processes hold together in a larger unity. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings
And to add further empirical evidence to the claim that it must be a ‘soul’ that is keeping our material bodies together “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer”, advances in Quantum Biology now reveal that there is a transcendent, non-local, i.e. beyond space and time, component to our being that is found in every molecule of our material bodies…
Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology – video https://youtu.be/LHdD2Am1g5Y
,,, A transcendent component to our material bodies that is “conserved”. That is to say that it cannot be created nor destroyed,,,,, as Stuart Hameroff states in the following video: “the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
“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://youtu.be/jjpEc98o_Oo?t=300
Thus, as far as empirical evidence and logic, via Godel, is concerned, the Christian Theist is sitting VERY well in his claim that he has a soul. A soul created by God in which the “whole person” can be rationally grounded. Whereas the “neuronal illusion” of the atheist is, once again, at a complete loss to coherently explain why he is should be considered a ‘real person’ instead of a ‘neuronal illusion’ in the first place,, as well the atheists is at a complete loss to coherently explain why any of the preceding evidence that was presented should be found to be as it is: Verses
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” George MacDonald – Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood – 1892 Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul? Matthew 16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Matthew 22:37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
bornagain77_{April 21, 2018
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The following study is particularly interesting because it lists many case studies where even more than half a brain is missing from a “whole person”
Discrepancy Between Cerebral Structure and Cognitive Functioning: A Review – 2017 Excerpt: The aforementioned student of mathematics had a global IQ of 130 and a verbal IQ of 140 at the age of 25 (Lorber, 1983), but had “virtually no brain” (Lewin 1980, p. 1232).,,, This student belonged to the group of patients that Lorber classified as having “extreme hydrocephalus,” meaning that more than 90% of their cranium appeared to be filled with cerebrospinal fluid (Lorber, 1983).,,, Apart from the above-mentioned student of mathematics, he described a woman with an extreme degree of hydrocephalus showing “virtually no cerebral mantle” who had an IQ of 118, a girl aged 5 who had an IQ of 123 despite extreme hydrocephalus, a 7-year-old boy with gross hydrocephalus and an IQ of 128, another young adult with gross hydrocephalus and a verbal IQ of 144, and a nurse and an English teacher who both led normal lives despite gross hydrocephalus.,,, Another interesting case is that of a 44-year-old woman with very gross hydrocephalus described by Masdeu (2008) and Masdeu et al. (2009). She had a global IQ of 98, worked as an administrator for a government agency, and spoke seven languages.,,, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/12/Discrepancy-between-cerebral-structure-and-cognitive-functioning-JNMD.pdf
Besides “personhood”, there are also many other “abstract” immaterial things that the human mind thinks about that are not reducible to the material states of the brain.
The Fundamental Difference Between Humans and Nonhuman Animals – Michael Egnor – November 5, 2015 Excerpt: Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts. Human beings are rational animals. Human rationality is not merely a highly evolved kind of animal perception. Human rationality is qualitatively different — ontologically different — from animal perception. Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.,,, It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/the_fundamental_2100661.html The Representation Problem and the Immateriality of the Mind - Michael Egnor - February 5, 2018 Excerpt: The human mind is a composite of material particular thought and immaterial abstract thought. Interestingly, modern neuroscience supports this view. Perception of particulars maps with precision to brain anatomy, but abstract thought is not mapped in the same way. Material powers of the brain are ordinarily necessary for exercise of abstract thought (e.g., you have to be awake to think about justice), but matter is not sufficient for abstract thought. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/the-representation-problem-and-the-immateriality-of-the-mind/
Immaterial “abstract” Mathematics is particularly interesting to think about.
An Interview with David Berlinski – Jonathan Witt Berlinski: There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time…. Interviewer:… Come again(?) … Berlinski: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/found-upon-web-and-reprinted-here.html
If our mind, instead of being immaterial as is commonly held, were purely physical as the atheistic materialist holds, then how is it that our mind is even able to think about abstract immaterial concepts such as mathematics in the first place? Moreover, if atheistic materialism were true, and mathematics is basically, like consciousness, illusory, then why is it that science itself is so crucially dependent on this immaterial illusory thing of mathematics?
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
It is extremely ironic that, besides Darwinian evolution already being shown to be mathematically impossible (Sanford, Dembski, Marks, Axe, Behe, Durston etc.. etc..), Darwinian evolution is now also falsified as being a scientific theory since it denies the very reality of the one thing it most needs, i.e. mathematics, in order to be considered scientific in the first place. Many times atheists will claim that there is no empirical evidence for the immaterial mind. Yet the fact of the matter is that they, apparently, never looked for any evidence. If they would have looked for evidence for the immaterial mind they certainly would have quickly found it.
Materialism of the Gaps – Michael Egnor (Neurosurgeon) – January 29, 2009 Excerpt: The evidence that some aspects of the mind are immaterial is overwhelming. It’s notable that many of the leading neuroscientists — Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles, Libet — were dualists. Dualism of some sort is the most reasonable scientific framework to apply to the mind-brain problem, because, unlike dogmatic materialism, it just follows the evidence. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/01/materialism_of_the_gaps015901.html Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior? -Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen D. Vohs – 2010 Excerpt: The evidence for conscious causation of behavior is profound, extensive, adaptive, multifaceted, and empirically strong. http://carlsonschool.umn.edu/assets/165663.pdf “We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists who often confuse their religion with their science.” - John C. Eccles, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind – 1984 The Case for the Soul: Quantum Biology – (7:25 minute mark – The Mind is able to modify the brain – Brain Plasticity, and Mindfulness control of DNA expression) https://youtu.be/6_xEraQWvgM?t=446
bornagain77_{April 21, 2018
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As to:
He (Harris) understands that his materialism precludes, in principle, the existence of immaterial consciousness, and so he denies consciousness exists. Yes, I know, it is gobsmackingly stupid. But at least it is an honest sort of stupidity.
Harris is far from the only atheistic materialist to honestly admit that "materialism precludes, in principle, the existence of immaterial consciousness". Here are a few more:
Ross Douthat Is On Another Erroneous Rampage Against Secularism – Jerry Coyne – December 26, 2013 Excerpt: “many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” Jerry Coyne – Professor of Evolutionary Biology – Atheist https://newrepublic.com/article/116047/ross-douthat-wrong-about-secularism-and-ethics At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that: “consciousness is an illusion” A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion…what isn’t?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s “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 The Consciousness Deniers – Galen Strawson – March 13, 2018 Excerpt: What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience.,,, Who are the Deniers?,,, Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett.,,, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/ “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor “that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.” Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994
Right here on the pages of UD, Bob (and weave) O'Hara and Allan Keith have repeatedly strenuously objected to being called 'neuronal illusions', and claimed that, (despite the fact they were shown that many leading atheists themselves claim to be illusions), only a few leading atheistic philosophers hold that they are neuronal illusions instead of real people. But I hold that the reason that even more leading atheists do not claim to be illusions is that few leading atheists are brave enough to admit, in public, the self defeating, and insane, fact that their materialistic worldview leads to the conclusion that they do not really exist as real people: " Nobody wants to stand up there and say, “You know, I’m not really here”.
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
Bob (and weave) O'Hara and Allan Keith, since they adamantly claim that they really do exist as real people, and that they most certainly are not 'neuronal illusions', must believe that their reductive materialism, that they hold to be true as a worldview, must somehow be compatible with immaterial consciousness. Yet, the fact of the matter is that people turning into neuronal illusions is a direct consequence of the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought. As the following article points out, "Consciousness is an illusion because naturalism has no place for it. Whatever is real is reducible to the physical; consciousness is not reducible to the physical; ergo, consciousness does not exist in reality: it is an illusion."
Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not? – Maverick Philosopher – 2017 Excerpt: But here comes Danny (Dennett) the Sophist who asserts that consciousness is an illusion. Well, that is just nonsense,,, If consciousness is an illusion, then it is an illusion for consciousness.,,, Consciousness is not only presupposed by the distinction between reality and illusion, it is also presupposed by the quest for explanation. For where would explanations reside if not in the minds of conscious beings? So I say consciousness cannot be an illusion. One cannot explain it the way Dennett wants to explain it, which involves explaining it away. For details, see Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked. But if consciousness, per impossibile, were an illusion, why wouldn’t truth also be an illusion? Consciousness is an illusion because naturalism has no place for it. Whatever is real is reducible to the physical; consciousness is not reducible to the physical; ergo, consciousness does not exist in reality: it is an illusion. By the same reasoning, truth ought also to be an illusion since there is no place for it in the natural world. Note also that Dennett obviously thinks that truth is objectively valuable and pursuit-worthy. Where locate values in a naturalist scheme? Wouldn’t it be more consistent for Dennett to go whole hog and explain away both consciousness and truth? Perhaps he ought to go POMO (post modern). There is no truth; there are only interpretations and perspectives of organisms grubbing for survival. What justifies him in privileging his naturalist narrative? It is one among many. I say consciousness and truth are on a par: neither can be explained away. Neither is eliminable. Neither is an illusion. Both are part of what we must presuppose to explain anything. Nietzsche had a great insight: No God, no truth. For the POMOs there is neither. For me there is both. For the inconsistent Dennett there is the second but not the first. Again, there is simply no place for truth in a wholly material world. For an argument from truth to God, see here. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2017/02/consciousness-is-an-illusion-but-truth-is-not.html
Thus, despite the fact that Bob (and weave) O'Hara and Allan Keith may strongly object to being thought of as neuronal illusions, the fact of the matter is that that conclusion is a direct consequence of the Atheistic materialism that they themselves claim to be the true worldview. Moreover, as Wilder Penfield and others have demonstrated, the person of "I" simply is not reducible to brain states:
A MAP OF THE SOUL - Michael Egnor - June 29, 2017 Excerpt: Wilder Penfield, an early-twentieth-century neurosurgeon who pioneered seizure surgery, noted that during brain stimulation on awake patients, he was never able to stimulate the mind itself—the sense of “I”—but only fragmented sensations and perceptions and movements and memories. Our core identity cannot be evoked or altered by physical stimulation of the brain. Relatedly, Penfield observed that spontaneous electrical discharges in the brain cause involuntary sensations and movements and even emotions, but never abstract reasoning or calculation. There are no “calculus” seizures or “moral” seizures, in which patients involuntarily take second derivatives or ponder mercy. Similar observations emerge from Roger Sperry’s famous studies of patients who had undergone surgery to disconnect the hemispheres of the brain. This was done to prevent seizures. The post-operative patients experienced peculiar perceptual and behavioral changes, but they retained unity of personal identity—a unified intellect and will. The changes Sperry discovered in his research (for which he won a Nobel Prize) were so subtle as to pass unnoticed in everyday life. In the past decade, British researcher Adrian Owen has found using fMRI imaging that some patients with such severe brain damage that they are considered to be in a persistent vegetative state are actually capable of sophisticated thought. The “comatose” patients’ brain scans show that, in reply to questions by an examiner, the patients are in fact thinking and imagining. The woman on the operating table who was talking to me while I removed her frontal lobe had both material and immaterial powers of mind. Our higher brain functions defy precise mapping onto brain tissue, because they are not generated by tissue, as our lower brain functions are. Materialism, the view that matter is all that exists, is the premise of much contemporary thinking about what a human being is. Yet evidence from the laboratory, operating room, and clinical experience points to a less fashionable conclusion: Human beings straddle the material and immaterial realms. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/a-map-of-the-soul
To get this point across even more clearly, if a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before. But that is not the case, the ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
Removing Half of Brain Improves Young Epileptics’ Lives: – 1997 Excerpt: “We are awed by the apparent retention of memory and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor,” Dr. Eileen P. G. Vining,, Dr. John Freeman, the director of the Johns Hopkins Pediatric Epilepsy Center, said he was dumbfounded at the ability of children to regain speech after losing the half of the brain that is supposedly central to language processing. ”It’s fascinating,” Dr. Freeman said. ”The classic lore is that you can’t change language after the age of 2 or 3.” But Dr. Freeman’s group has now removed diseased left hemispheres in more than 20 patients, including three 13-year-olds whose ability to speak transferred to the right side of the brain in much the way that Alex’s did.,,, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/19/science/removing-half-of-brain-improves-young-epileptics-lives.html
In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study:
“Despite removal of one hemisphere, the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved. Intellect was only affected in the one child who had remained in a coma, vigil-like state, attributable to peri-operative complications.”
Further notes along this line:
Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One – May 2007 Excerpt: Most Hopkins hemispherectomy patients are five to 10 years old. Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. ,,, Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. “One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely,” Freeman says. Of course, the operation has its downside: “You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost,” Freeman says. Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. ,,, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-when-half-brain-better-than-whole How Removing Half of Someone’s Brain Can Improve Their Life – Oct. 2015 Excerpt: Next spring, del Peral (who has only half a brain) will graduate from Curry College, where she has made the dean’s list every semester since freshman year. http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70120/how-removing-half-someones-brain-can-improve-their-life
bornagain77_{April 21, 2018
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When someone uses Southern Poverty Law Center as a source, I just chuckle and go elsewhere.mike1962_{April 21, 2018
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