Wow. Panpsychism gets a respectful hearing at Scientific American

Ed George,

Option 1: address the issue. Option 2: declare the opposition as sub human and avoid addressing the issue. Yup. That’s a strategy. A lame, moronic one, but still a strategy.

What in blue blazes are you talking about? Where in the world did I say that Sev was 'sub human'? I said that if his philosophy of atheistic materialism were actually true then his sense of self, by logical necessity, is an 'illusion". For crying out loud, it is what HIS atheistic materialism itself declares. I even provided many quotes from leading atheistic materialists themselves to back up what I said. i.e. It is NOT me insulting 'you' and Seversky, it is your own atheistic materialism that is insulting 'you' and Seversky. If 'you' are going to be upset, then be rightly upset at your very own worldview, Darwinian materialism, that forces 'you' into such an insane position as denying that 'you' really exist as a real person. i.e. If you are going to call anything lame and moronic then rightly call your atheistic materialism lame and moronic since it is what is in fact insulting 'you' as, not only as being a 'sub human', (in that you have lost your divine dimension of being 'made in the image of God'), but your philosophy is also insulting 'you' as a 'non-person' by denying that 'you' even exist! I can guarantee you that Christianity does not 'insult' you with the 'lame and moronic' claim that you are 'sub human' or that you a 'non-person' who does not really exist! In Christianity, you have infinite value in that God Himself died for you so that 'you' may inherit eternal life with Him! Why you and Seversky hold onto such an insane position as atheistic materialism I have no idea. The materialistic claim that our sense of self is an illusion is, simply, a blatantly self-refuting (pun intended) position. As David Bentley Hart succinctly put it, “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”

The Illusionist – Daniel Dennett’s latest book marks five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness. – 2017 Excerpt: “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.” – David Bentley Hart https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist

Supplemental note as to life after death:

The Easter Question - Eben Alexander, M.D. - March 2013 Excerpt: More than ever since my near death experience, I consider myself a Christian -,,, Now, I can tell you that if someone had asked me, in the days before my NDE, what I thought of this (Easter) story, I would have said that it was lovely. But it remained just that -- a story. To say that the physical body of a man who had been brutally tortured and killed could simply get up and return to the world a few days later is to contradict every fact we know about the universe. It wasn't simply an unscientific idea. It was a downright anti-scientific one. But it is an idea that I now believe. Not in a lip-service way. Not in a dress-up-it's-Easter kind of way. I believe it with all my heart, and all my soul.,, We are, really and truly, made in God's image. But most of the time we are sadly unaware of this fact. We are unconscious both of our intimate kinship with God, and of His constant presence with us. On the level of our everyday consciousness, this is a world of separation -- one where people and objects move about, occasionally interacting with each other, but where essentially we are always alone. But this cold dead world of separate objects is an illusion. It's not the world we actually live in.,,, ,,He (God) is right here with each of us right now, seeing what we see, suffering what we suffer... and hoping desperately that we will keep our hope and faith in Him. Because that hope and faith will be triumphant. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eben-alexander-md/the-easter-question_b_2979741.html

bornagain77

January 15, 2020

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seversky:

You can’t kick something that just isn’t there.

That's why no one kicks the evidence for materialism. I wonder if seversky has tried kicking sunlight? seversky thinks that you can block radio waves by kicking themET

January 15, 2020

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@6 Ed George: Option 3: appeal to emotions. Atheist materialists are in fact good Christians: Matthew 16:24 'Then Jesus said to his disciples': "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves...''Truthfreedom

January 15, 2020

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BA77

Says the subjective experience of your mind in all its glory. Moreover, who is this ‘you’ that ‘you’ keep referring to that gets his toe hurt? Remember, ‘you’ are an atheistic materialist. Ergo, ‘you’ do not exist!

Option 1: address the issue. Option 2: declare the opposition as sub human and avoid addressing the issue. Yup. That’s a strategy. A lame, moronic one, but still a strategy.Ed George

January 15, 2020

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Sev:

"if you kick it, it hurts your toe."

Says the subjective experience of your mind in all its glory. Moreover, who is this 'you' that 'you' keep referring to that gets his toe hurt? Remember, 'you' are an atheistic materialist. Ergo, 'you' are an illusion, "You" do not exist!

"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 “I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense.” Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion “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 “(Daniel) Dennett concludes, ‘nobody is conscious … we are all zombies’.” J.W. SCHOOLER & C.A. SCHREIBER – Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection – 2004 The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness - STEVEN PINKER - Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? - M. Anthony Mills - April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html

bornagain77

January 15, 2020

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Can you imagine that years ago? But the fact is, materialists are out of ideas about consciousness and don’t know where to go.

That goes for pretty much all of us.

Make no mistake, panpsychism—as Goff elucidates it—is a purely naturalist view (“nothing supernatural or spiritual”). But, unlike the village atheist, he goes on to ask, but then what IS nature? Matter is all there is? But what IS matter? It turns out, no one really knows

The thing about matter is that, if you kick it, it hurts your toe. Hard to do that with the immaterial like souls or ghosts or even heaven or God. You can't kick something that just isn't thereSeversky

January 15, 2020

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as to this quote from the article:

"Yes, physical science has been incredibly successful. But it’s been successful precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.” GARETH COOK, “DOES CONSCIOUSNESS PERVADE THE UNIVERSE?” AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (JANUARY 14, 2020)

Although the experience of qualia itself, i.e. ‘qualities’, is forever beyond the scope of physical measurement,

As Frank Jackson made clear in his philosophical argument ‘Mary’s Room’, no amount of scientific and physical examination on Mary’s part will ever reveal to Mary exactly what the inner subjective conscious experience, i.e. qualia, of the color blue actually is until Mary actually experiences what the color blue is for herself.

11.2.1 Qualia - Perception (“The Hard Problem” ) Philosopher of the mind Frank Jackson imagined a thought experiment —Mary’s Room— to explain qualia and why it is such an intractable problem for science. The problem identified is referred to as the knowledge argument. Here is the description of the thought experiment: “Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence 'The sky is blue'. (...) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?" Jackson believed that Mary did learn something new: she learned what it was like to experience color. "It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism [materialism] is false.” https://www.urantia.org/study/seminar-presentations/is-there-design-in-nature#Emergence

Although the experience of qualia itself, i.e. ‘qualities’, is forever beyond the scope of physical measurement, there are other attributes of the immaterial mind that do lend themselves to physical measurement, or more exactly, ‘reveal themselves’ to physical measurement. Dr. Michael Egnor, who is a neurosurgeon as well as professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, states that there are six properties of immaterial mind that are irreconcilable with materialism, They are, “Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,,”

The Mind and Materialist Superstition – Michael Egnor – 2008 Six “conditions of mind” that are irreconcilable with materialism: – Excerpt: Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/11/the_mind_and_materialist_super013961.html

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.

Six reasons why you should believe in non-physical minds – 01/30/2014 1) First-person access to mental properties 2) Our experience of consciousness implies that we are not our bodies 3) Persistent self-identity through time 4) Mental properties cannot be measured like physical objects 5) Intentionality or About-ness 6) Free will and personal responsibility http://winteryknight.com/2014/01/30/six-reasons-why-you-should-believe-in-non-physical-minds/

And again, while the attribute of qualia itself appears to forever be beyond the scope of physical measurement I find that the attributes of Persistence of Self-Identity through time (which may also be termed ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), and of free will do reveal themselves in physical measurement. Specifically reveal themselves in the ‘measurement’ of quantum mechanics. I go over how those particular attributes of immaterial mind reveal themselves to us in ‘physical measurement’, i.e. in quantum mechanics, in the following video:

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

Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:

1. Consciousness either precedes all of material reality or is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality.

And here are eight intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness must precede material reality (Double Slit, Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, validation of Wigner’s Friend thought experiment, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect, Quantum Information theory, and the closing of the Free Will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company): Here are a couple of examples from that list. First, via Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment, ““It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”

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

and secondly, via Leggett’s inequality, “Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it.”

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality - Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell's inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics. Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization. They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism." http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

Verse:

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

Supplemental note:

December 2019 - Although each of those (eight) experiments are very interesting in their own right as to proving that the Mind of God must precede material reality, my favorite evidences out of that group, for proving that the Mind of God must be behind the creation of the universe itself, is the Quantum Zeno effect and Quantum Information theory. This is because the Quantum Zeno effect and Quantum Information theory deal directly with entropy. And, entropy is, by a VERY wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose himself stated that, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.” https://uncommondescent.com/big-bang/sabine-hossenfelder-physicists-theories-of-how-the-universe-began-arent-any-better-than-traditional-tales-of-creation/#comment-690210

bornagain77

January 15, 2020

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as to this quote,

"Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe." GARETH COOK, “DOES CONSCIOUSNESS PERVADE THE UNIVERSE?” AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (JANUARY 14, 2020)

OK, if electrons are supposedly conscious, and all the matter and energy of the universe was created approx. 14 billion years ago, then does not it stand to reason that some incredibly powerful conscious being, i.e. God, brought all those conscious particles into existence? :) It seems to me that, at the origin of the universe at least, panpsychists suffer an even bigger conundrum than Darwinian materialists do in explaining the origin of consciousness since panpsychists have already conceded the existence of consciousness at the origin of the universe itself. And therefore it necessarily follows, via the necessity of causal sufficiency, that for panpsychists to explain the origin of all those conscious particles at the origin of the universe, that panpsychists are forced to postulate a cause, i.e. God, that is sufficient within itself to explain the effect in question, i.e. namely, a universe full of conscious particles. Thus, whilst panpsychists apparently believe that they may have the upper hand on Darwinian materialists in explaining the 'hard problem' of consciousness, in that they claim consciousness is already present in the elementary particles, never-the-less, their supposed solution turns around and bites them big time at the origin of the universe since they have already conceded the existence of consciousness. i.e. Any cause sufficient to bring about the effect in question, namely a universe full of conscious particles, must necessarily already have the ability within itself to impart consciousness into all those material particles., i.e. God!bornagain77

January 15, 2020

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PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM SHOULD BE ON ITS DEATH BED 'Philosophical materialism, the foundation of Western academia, is showing ever-widening cracks'. 'Materialistic evolutionists believe that life began and emerged on earth as a result of unguided purposeless processes. It makes little difference whether we call them materialists or metaphysical naturalists. To the materialist, only matter (with its governing laws) is real. In other words, to the believer in philosophical materialism, reality cannot exist beyond physical objects in a space-time universe governed by the laws of science. He allows no room for intelligent purpose, guidance, design, or final cause. To a metaphysical naturalist, observable events are explainable only by natural causes that are, in principle, discernable using the scientific method –i.e. scientifically testable (or falsifiable). This view has also been called “scientism”. These philosophical positions are all similar, and all atheistic. No supernatural agency is allowed'. 'As the basic philosophical foundation for secular education and research in Western academia, philosophical materialism has reigned supreme for about 150 years. If any academician working in a secular educational institution were to challenge this foundation, his challenge would be deemed unacceptable --a forbidden taboo --by most who hold the reigns of power in Western secular education at all levels'. 'But philosophical materialism is now showing ever-widening cracks in its here-to-for monolithic foundation. And there are good reasons why it should no longer reign supreme'. http://web.csulb.edu/~mbiedeba/ch1.htmlTruthfreedom

January 15, 2020

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