Wise words from Rabbi Moshe Averick

"I throw you a piece of red meat" You threw me a piece of rotten garbage and called it red meat! Disagee? Then pick out exactly what he said that settled the 'hard problem' once and for all and send it to Nagel, Chalmers, Hoffman, Egnor, and all the others who find the hard problem to be irreconcilable for materialistic explanations. His article boils down to, "nothing to see here folks move along". The profound problems he skips over in order to claim that 'Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s (just) Matter' are numerous. If he is going to claim that rocks are subjectively conscious, which is what he is basically doing with 'the hard problem', I certainly want to see some fairly profound empirical evidence rather than the philosophical hand waving that he presented. Supplemental note: Einstein did not win a Nobel prize for relativity because he basically ran straight up against 'the hard problem' of consciousness:

Einstein vs. "The Now" of Philosophers and Quantum Mechanics – video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1129789497033982/?type=2&theater Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time - Wednesday 24 June 2015 Excerpt: The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but. ‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’ It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow. As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact. ‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’ The night would only get worse. ‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’ Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity. Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time. So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities. Bergson was fond of saying that time was the experience of waiting for a lump of sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. It was a declaration that one could not talk about time without reference to human consciousness and human perception. Einstein would say that time is what clocks measure. Bergson would no doubt ask why we build clocks in the first place. ‘He argued that if we didn’t have a prior sense of time we wouldn’t have been led to build clocks and we wouldn’t even use them ... unless we wanted to go places and to events that mattered,’ says Canales. ‘You can see that their points of view were very different.’ In a theoretical nutshell this expressed perfectly the division between lived time and spacetime: subjective experience versus objective reality.,,, Just when Einstein thought he had it worked out, along came the discovery of quantum theory and with it the possibility of a Bergsonian universe of indeterminacy and change. God did, it seems, play dice with the universe, contra to Einstein’s famous aphorism. Some supporters went as far as to say that Bergson’s earlier work anticipated the quantum revolution of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg by four decades or more. Canales quotes the literary critic Andre Rousseaux, writing at the time of Bergson’s death. ‘The Bergson revolution will be doubled by a scientific revolution that, on its own, would have demanded the philosophical revolution that Bergson led, even if he had not done it.’ Was Bergson right after all? Time will tell. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/science-vs-philosophy-and-the-meaning-of-time/6539568

After Bergson, Einstein had an encounter with Carnap, another philosopher, and Einstein was asked

"Can physics demonstrate the existence of 'the now' in order to make the notion of 'now' into a scientifically valid term?"

Einstein's answer was categorical, he said:

"The experience of 'the now' cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics."

Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video.

Stanley L. Jaki: "The Mind and Its Now" https://vimeo.com/10588094

And here a bit more detail:

The Mind and Its Now - May 22, 2008 - By Stanley L. Jaki Excerpt: ,,, Rudolf Carnap, and the only one among them who was bothered with the mind's experience of its now. His concern for this is noteworthy because he went about it in the wrong way. He thought that physics was the only sound way to know and to know anything. It was therefore only logical on his part that he should approach, we are around 1935, Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the day, with the question whether it was possible to turn the experience of the now into a scientific knowledge. Such knowledge must of course be verified with measurement. We do not have the exact record of Carnap's conversation with Einstein whom he went to visit in Princeton, at eighteen hours by train at that time from Chicago. But from Einstein's reply which Carnap jotted down later, it is safe to assume that Carnap reasoned with him as outlined above. Einstein's answer was categorical: The experience of the now cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement. It can never be part of physics. http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

The meaning of the question of 'the Now' can be read in full context in the following article:

The Mind and Its Now - Stanley L. Jaki, May 2008 Excerpts: There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, Three quarters of a century ago Charles Sherrington, the greatest modern student of the brain, spoke memorably on the mind's baffling independence of the brain. The mind lives in a self-continued now or rather in the now continued in the self. This life involves the entire brain, some parts of which overlap, others do not. ,,,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. ,,, the now is immensely richer an experience than any marvelous set of numbers, even if science could give an account of the set of numbers, in terms of energy levels. The now is not a number. It is rather a word, the most decisive of all words. It is through experiencing that word that the mind comes alive and registers all existence around and well beyond. ,,, All our moments, all our nows, flow into a personal continuum, of which the supreme form is the NOW which is uncreated, because it simply IS. http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

The statement to Carnap on the train that, 'the now' cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement’, was an interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since 'the now of the mind' has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, now undermined the space-time of Einstein's General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality.

Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor Excerpt: “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. 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!” 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 LIVING IN A QUANTUM WORLD - Vlatko Vedral - 2011 Excerpt: Thus, the fact that quantum mechanics applies on all scales forces us to confront the theory’s deepest mysteries. We cannot simply write them off as mere details that matter only on the very smallest scales. For instance, space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, with­out a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must explain space and time (4D space-time) as somehow emerging from fundamentally spaceless and timeless physics. http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/Notes10b/0611038.pdf

bornagain77

BA77 @4: I throw you a piece of red meat, and that's all I get? :) es58

per NYT article at 3, and that article is one more reason, as if we needed any more reasons, to let the NY Times go the way of dinosaurs into extinction. bornagain77

The New York Times explains it all for you, here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?_r=0 Enjoy! es58

News, there are some great quotes available from that book. :) Generally, these atheist writers display spectacular ignorance... - p. 35 Mung

from the Amazon page:

Excerpt: ,,,"Exploring the Modern Atheistic movement in its failed attempts to confront the baffling scientific mysteries of the Origin of Life and Human Consciousness, https://www.amazon.com/Nonsense-High-Order-Confused-Atheism/dp/1535018348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

I'm glad to see Rabbi M.Averick bring his fairly impressive talent for literature research, besides bringing it to the Origin of Life (OOL), to the 'baffling scientific mystery' of Human consciousness. Human consciousness is a mystery to which Darwinists are even more baffled than they are with the profound enigma of the OOL. A few Notes:

Origin of Life: An Inside Story - Professor James Tour – May 1, 2016 Excerpt: “All right, now let’s assemble the Dream Team. We’ve got good professors here, so let’s assemble the Dream Team. Let’s further assume that the world’s top 100 synthetic chemists, top 100 biochemists and top 100 evolutionary biologists combined forces into a limitlessly funded Dream Team. The Dream Team has all the carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids and nucleic acids stored in freezers in their laboratories… All of them are in 100% enantiomer purity. [Let’s] even give the team all the reagents they wish, the most advanced laboratories, and the analytical facilities, and complete scientific literature, and synthetic and natural non-living coupling agents. Mobilize the Dream Team to assemble the building blocks into a living system – nothing complex, just a single cell. The members scratch their heads and walk away, frustrated… So let’s help the Dream Team out by providing the polymerized forms: polypeptides, all the enzymes they desire, the polysaccharides, DNA and RNA in any sequence they desire, cleanly assembled. The level of sophistication in even the simplest of possible living cells is so chemically complex that we are even more clueless now than with anything discussed regarding prebiotic chemistry or macroevolution. The Dream Team will not know where to start. Moving all this off Earth does not solve the problem, because our physical laws are universal. You see the problem for the chemists? Welcome to my world. This is what I’m confronted with, every day.“ James Tour – leading Chemist https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/origin-of-life-professor-james-tour-points-the-way-forward-for-intelligent-design/ The “Hard Problem” of Life - Sara Imari Walker and Paul C.W. Davies = June 23, 2016 Excerpt:. In the case of consciousness, it seems evident that certain aspects will ultimately defy reductionist explanation, the most important being the phenomenon of qualia – roughly speaking our subjective experience as observers. It is a priori far from obvious why we should have experiences such as the sensation of the smell of coffee or the blueness of the sky. Subjective experience isn’t necessary for the evolution of intelligence (we could for example be zombies in the philosophical sense and appear to function just as well from the outside with nothing going on inside). Even if we do succeed in eventually uncovering a complete mechanistic understanding of the wiring and firing of every neuron in the brain, it might tell us nothing about thoughts, feelings and what it is like to experience something. Our phenomenal experiences are the only aspect of consciousness that appears as though it cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles. This led Chalmers to identify pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness” [5]. The corresponding “easy problems” (in practice not so easy) are associated with mapping the neural correlates of various experiences. By focusing attention on the problem of subjective experience, Chalmers highlighted the truly inexplicable aspect of consciousness, based on our current understanding.,,, ,,,in the same way that Chalmers identified qualia as central to the hard problem of consciousness. To that end we propose that the hard problem of life is the problem of how ‘information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information is central to explaining life and why it is hard, that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem will not ultimately be reducible to known physical principles.,,, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07184v1.pdf David Chalmers on Consciousness (Descartes, Philosophical Zombies and the Hard Problem) – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo ‘But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.’ David Barash – Materialist/Atheist - evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the ­University of Washington “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 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 "I think the idea of (materialists) saying that consciousness is an illusion doesn’t really work because the very notion of an illusion presupposes consciousness. There are no illusions unless there is a conscious experience or (a conscious person) for whom there is an illusion." Evan Thompson, Philosopher - author of Waking, Dreaming, Being

Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Sebastian Seung stated:

“Every day we recall the past, perceive the present and imagine the future. How do our brains accomplish these feats? It’s safe to say that nobody really knows.”

There is simply no direct evidence that anything material is capable of generating consciousness. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor says,

"Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. Regardless of our knowledge of the structure of the brain, no one has any idea how the brain could possibly generate conscious experience."

As Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry wrote,

"Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature."

From modern physics, Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner agreed:

"We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind."

Contemporary physicist Nick Herbert states,

"Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot."

Physician and author Larry Dossey wrote:

"No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians' hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it."

Moreover, even if Darwinists could somehow explain the 'illusion' of consciousness, the perceptions of reality that that supposed 'illusion of consciousness' would be having would be illusory too!: In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then all of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.

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

Thus, given materialistic/atheistic premises, people become illusions whose observations of reality are themselves illusory. And why in blue blazes should anyone trust what illusions having illusions have to say about reality? Much less, how can a coherent scientific theory ever be based on illusions having illusions? (See Edgar Allen Poe - 'A Dream within a Dream")

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

Moreover, completely contrary to materialistic premises, 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 math of population genetics dictates. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.

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

Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the math of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory! :) bornagain77