Or something. Pop science changes so much.
The “lizard brain” is part of what science used to know about the brain that ain’t so:
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Northeastern University psychology prof and author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020), is candid about the way new research has cast doubt on old saws in science: “As a neuroscientist, I see scientific myths about the brain repeated regularly in the media and corners of academic research.”
The myth she targets in a recent article at Nautilus is the “triune brain,” the idea that our brain developed and continues to function in three successive layers.
First developed by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007) in the 1960s and set out in more detail in his 1990 book The Triune Brain in Evolution, the triune brain theory posited three successive layers of brain:
● the Reptilian Complex (the lizard brain that keeps the body going)
● the Paleo-Mammalian Complex (the early mammal “emotional” brain) and
● the Neo-Mammalian Complex (the late mammal “smart” brain).
It was way too Cool to be false and perfect for pop psychology.Lisa Feldman Barrett dismisses talk of our “ancient” lizard brain as a bygone relic: “Most neurons have multiple jobs, not a single psychological purpose.”
News, “No, you do not have a lizard brain inside your human brain” at Mind Matters News
Such perfect Darwinism, it had to be true. But look what happened…
And so unfair to lizards too.
You may also wish to read: Your mind vs. your brain:
Ten things to know
and
Do we really have free will? Four things to know
A lot of the notions about rigid division arose after digital thinking became the norm. When most scientists were familiar with analog mechanisms, and used analog meters and devices in physical experiments, holistic notions were much more common. Freud’s id, ego and superego were functional modes of the entire brain, not sections of the CPU.
Darwinists will ignore this as they do everything else that disproves belief. They believe it is true because they want to believe it to be true. How depressing it must be to be a Darwinist? Holding on to the ridiculous notion that man has no real meaning or purpose.
I certainly enjoyed her article debunking the false Darwinian belief in a ‘lizard brain’.
But I could not help noticing that Dr. Barrett still harbors some rather major false Darwinian beliefs herself.
First off, in her article Dr. Barrett correctly holds that “Being wrong is a normal and inevitable part of the scientific process”. And also correctly holds that new discoveries lead to “major course corrections in our understanding of how the world works”. But, (while correctly stating that quantum physics was a major course correction in science), she then falsely assumes that natural selection was also a major course correction in science.
Contrary to what Dr. Barrett apparently falsely believes, Natural Selection was certainly not a ‘major course correction’ in science. If anything, Natural selection has grossly misled science down the wrong scientific path.
Prior to the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the default assumption in science was that life was, obviously, the product of Intelligent Design.
To this day the impression of Intelligent Design is simply overwhelming, As Francis Crick explained, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
And indeed there is good reason for Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, to have said what he said. Just looking at a cross section of DNA is enough for most fair minded people to see that life, obviously, must have been Intelligently designed:
And here is a humorous example of just how hard it was for one young atheist to fight off the impression of “extraordinary design” that he was seeing in biology.
And therefore, (since the default impression was, (and still is), that life was obviously Intelligently Designed), Natural Selection was envisioned by Charles Darwin to function as a ‘Designer substitute’ to try to explain the obvious design that we see in life.
As Richard Dawkins explained in his book “The Blind Watchmaker”, “Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”
And as Francisco J. Ayala stated in his article entitled ‘Design without designer’, “Darwin’s theory of natural selection accounts for the ‘design’ of organisms, and for their wondrous diversity, as the result of natural processes,”,,, Darwin’s focus in The Origin was the explanation of design.’
And as Ernst Mayr stated in 2009 ‘Every aspect of the “wonderful design” so admired by the natural theologians could be explained by natural selection.’
Yet, Natural Selection is now found, via the mathematics of population genetics, to be grossly inadequate of the supposed ‘Designer substitute’ that Darwinists falsely envisioned it to be.
And with natural selection, (i.e. the ‘designer substitute’), being tossed to the wayside by the mathematics of population genetics itself, then, of course, the default assumption that life is Intelligently designed comes to the forefront once again.
As Richard Sternberg stated in the following video, “if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.”
Yet, many Darwinists who are familiar with the failings of natural selection within the mathematics of population genetics, (instead of embracing Design), are now championing what is termed ‘neutral theory’.
As Austin Hughs explained, ‘Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance.’
Thus, with Natural selection being tossed to the wayside by population genetics, (as the supposed explanation for the ‘wonderful design’ we see in life), Darwinists did not accept such a devastating finding as an outright falsification for their theory, as they rightly should have done, but instead are now reduced to arguing that the ‘wonderful design’ we see in life is, basically, the result of pure chance with natural selection now playing a very negligible role if any role at all.
.
Even Richard Dawkins himself finds the claim that chance can build such wonderful design to be ‘absolutely inconceivable’.
As Dawkins states in the following video, the ‘appearance of design’, “cannot come about by chance. It’s absolutely inconceivable that you could get anything as complicated or well designed as a modern bird or a human or a hedgehog coming about by chance.’
To put it even more bluntly than Richard Dawkins did, Jay Homnick states, “Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.”
Contrary to what proponents of neutral theory may want to believe, (with natural selection being tossed to the wayside by population genetics as the supposed ‘designer substitute’ for the overwhelming appearance of design that we see in life), the explanation for the ‘extraordinary design’ that we see in life does not become, ‘well, pure chance must have done it”, as Neutral Theory advocates want to believe, but instead the explanation for life reverts back to the original assumption that life is, obviously, the product of Intelligent Design.
One final note, if anything ever gave overwhelming evidence for design, the human brain is certainly it.
Perhaps Dr. Barrett would like to try to explain how a single neuron can possibly come about by unguided Darwinian processes?
As to Dr. Barrett’s claim that “all mammal brains (and most likely, all vertebrate brains as well) are built from a single manufacturing plan using the same kinds of neurons.”
Well the claim of “a single manufacturing plan using the same kinds of neurons” is, if not an outright false claim, at the very least a severely misleading claim.
Another false Darwinian belief that Dr. Barrett harbors is the false Darwinian belief that the brain creates the mind. In her article she states, “Under the hood, however, your brain creates your mind while it regulates the systems of your body.”
First off, there is not one shred of scientific evidence that anything material is remotely capable of generating conscious experience:
And there are very good reasons for believing that it is impossible for anything material to ever generate consciousness. Many properties of mind are simply irreducible to materialistic explanations.
Dr. Michael Egnor, who is a neurosurgeon as well as professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, states six properties of immaterial mind that are irreconcilable to the view that the mind is just the material brain. Those six properties are, “Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,,”
Likewise, J. Warner Wallace has a very similar list, (but not an exact match to Dr. Egnor’s list), of six properties of immaterial mind that are irreconcilable with reductive materialism.
For example of one property of the immaterial mind that is forever irreconcilable with reductive materialism, with the ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’, (and/or ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), Stanley Jaki states that, “There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.”
In fact, Einstein’s conflict with the mental attribute of the ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’, (and/or ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), is precisely why Albert Einstein never received a Nobel Prize for special relativity,
Thus, it is not as if the differences between the mental attribute of the ‘experience of the now’ and with reductive materialism can be easily brushed under the rug.,, If they could be easily reconciled, then Einstein would have received a Nobel prize for Special Relativity.
In fact, according to recent advances in quantum theory, ‘the experience of ‘the Now” is a defining feature of reality and is therefore a powerful, (evidence based), argument that we live in a mental universe, and not in a materialistic universe (as Darwinists presuppose).
For instance, the following delayed choice experiment with atoms demonstrated that, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Likewise, the following violation of Leggett’s inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.
And as Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
There are many more lines of evidence from quantum mechanics that establish that we do indeed live in a Theistic universe where consciousness is held to be primary and material is held to be derivative, and not the other way around as Darwinists believe.
Moreover, if the brain created the mind as Darwinists believe then it would be impossible for the mind to ever have causal power over the brain. That is to say, it would be impossible for the mind to exert its intentions and will onto the material brain.
That is precisely why Darwinists, and materialists in general, constantly claim that free will is merely an illusion and that it does not really exist.
Yet free will is NOT an illusion. The mind, as Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz has shown, IS able to exert its intentions onto the material brain in order to produce physiological alterations to the brain..
This would simply be impossible if “your brain creates your mind” as Dr. Barrett falsely believes.
Moreover, the belief that “your brain creates your mind”, as Darwinists presuppose, leads to the catastrophic failure for any epistemological theory of knowledge that we may have.
As J.B.S. Haldane and C.S. Lewis noted,
Simply put, without the mental attribute of free will existing in some real and meaningful sense, then all hope is lost for us ever making logically coherent arguments in the first place.
This fact is clearly established by the fact that the denial of free will is a blatantly self refuting argument.
Perhaps no better example exists for this than this blatantly self refuting statement that Jerry Coyne made about free will, “”Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it.”
That statement should literally be the number one example of a self-refuting argument that is given in philosophy 101 classes.
The denial of free will is simply insane. As Dr. Michael Egnor noted, “Someday, I predict, there will be a considerable psychiatric literature on the denial of free will. It’s essentially a delusion dressed up as science. To insist that your neurotransmitters completely control your choices is no different than insisting that your television or your iphone control your thoughts. It’s crazy.”
Thus in conclusion, the false Darwinian belief that “your brain creates your mind” is refuted by evidence from quantum mechanics, evidence from neuroscience, and also by simple logic.
As they say in baseball, “three strikes and you’re out!” How much moreso should that be considered true in science?