In “You don’t really exist, do you?” (December 10, 2011), at his blog Rationally Speaking, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers reasons to reject the materialist claim that our consciousness is an illusion:
For some time I have been noticing the emergence of a strange trinity of beliefs among my fellow skeptics and freethinkers: an increasing number of them, it seems, don’t believe that they can make decisions (the free will debate), don’t believe that they have moral responsibility (because they don’t have free will, or because morality is relative — take your pick), and they don’t even believe that they exist as conscious beings because, you know, consciousness is an illusion.
… a closer look at the evidence does not bear out the increasingly persistent myth that “it’s all unconscious anyway.” Here very interesting work has been done by Alfred Mele at Florida State University. In his Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will, Mele critically examines claims to the effect that, for instance, our brains make decisions before we become conscious of them, or that intentions don’t play a role in producing actions. He finds the evidence for such extraordinary claims extraordinarily deficient and — to the contrary — lines up evidence from neurobiology for the conclusion that consciousness plays a major role in (some, most certainly not all) of our decisions, particularly when it comes to the sort of decisions we normally do attribute to conscious deliberation (like whether to change career, say, not just when to push a button on a computer screen, a la Libet experiments).
As a matter of fact, the older one gets, the more likely one is to take some time to make a decision – because all aspects of one’s mind are not reporting at once. Not all decisions are equally easy, or fact-rich.
That is why David Brooks’ “The young and the neuro” have got it all wrong.
It’s interesting how many atheists are pulling back from the materialist conclusions.
Of Related Note:
Please correct
The co-author of “What Darwin got wrong” is Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
You’re right! Never got them straight. Wow! That makes three atheists who don’t go along with the crudmeisters.
All the satirists in the world could not have concocted something so ridiculous as intellectuals consciously pondering whether consciousness exists.
What drives materialists crazy is that consciousness cannot be seen, tasted, smelled, touched, heard, or studied in a laboratory. But how could it be otherwise? Consciousness is the very thing that is DOING the seeing, the tasting, the smelling, etc… We define material objects by their effect upon our senses – how they feel in our hands, how they appear to our eyes. But we know consciousness simply by BEING it! Indeed, if consciousness did have weight, texture, odor, etc (and perhaps someone might argue that it does), then even if we did encounter those sensations, we would not interpret those things as consciousness, because the sensations caused externally by a conscious being are a very different thing from the experience of being conscious.
well, it’s time to implement the “thumbs up” / down buttons, b/c I want to give a thumbs up to APM@3 and this takes too long. Thanks!
APM, your very well put description of illustrating just how consciousness is at a primary, even ‘privileged’, position within reality actually does have some very strong experimental support, from the ‘laboratory’, in quantum mechanics:
Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries:
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
It is important to stress just how central ‘observation’ is in quantum mechanics as to collapsing a wave function to its ‘uncertain’ 3-Dimensional state:
Quote of note:
Can you give a couple examples of those who are crudmeisters? Thanks.
You are mixing two very different and unrelated notions of “privileged center.”
APM:
I add my humble thumbs up! 🙂
Neil Rickert,
Actually ‘privileged center’ is far more of a ‘privileged centered’ in the universe than I had related in that short post. Forgive the length, but this following longer post reveals just how profound centrality is for each individual observer in the universe:
Notes:
Centrality of Each Observer In The Universe and Christ’s Very Credible Reconciliation Of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
,,,A ‘Christian’ interpretation offers a very credible, empirically backed, reconciliation of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics:
First a little background:
,,, First I noticed that the earth demonstrates centrality in the universe in this following video Dr. Dembski posted on UD a while back;
,,, for a while I tried to see if the 4-D space-time of General Relativity was sufficient to explain centrality we witness for the earth in the universe,,,
,,,Thus from a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. Every point on the surface is moving away from each other, and every point is central, if that’s where you live.,,,
,,,yet there is a problem in that ‘simple’ solution for explaining why witness centrality for the earth in the universe. I kept running into the same problem for establishing the sufficiency of General Relativity to explain our centrality in this universe, in that every time I would perform a ‘thought experiment’ of trying radically different points of observation in the universe, General Relativity would fail to maintain centrality for the radically different point of observation in the universe. The primary reason for this failure of General Relativity to maintain centrality, for different points of observation in the universe, is due to the fact that there are limited (10^80) material particles to work with. Though this failure of General Relativity was obvious to me, I needed more proof so as to establish it more rigorously, so I dug around a bit and found this,,,
,,,and also ‘serendipitously’ found this,,,
,,,But if General Relativity is insufficient to explain the centrality we witness for ourselves in the universe, what else is? Universal Quantum wave collapse to each unique point of conscious observation is! To prove this point I dug around a bit and found this experiment,,,
,,,Moreover, there is even a experiment that shows that the preceding quantum experiments will never be overturned by another ‘future’ theory,,,
,, and to make universal Quantum Wave collapse much more ‘personal’ I found this,,,
,,,Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
I find it extremely interesting, and strange, that quantum mechanics tells us that instantaneous quantum wave collapse to its ‘uncertain’ 3-D state is centered on each individual observer in the universe, whereas, 4-D space-time cosmology (General Relativity) tells us each 3-D point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe. These findings of modern science are pretty much exactly what we would expect to see if this universe were indeed created, and sustained, from a higher dimension by a omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal Being who knows everything that is happening everywhere in the universe at the same time. These findings certainly seem to go to the very heart of the age old question asked of many parents by their children, “How can God hear everybody’s prayers at the same time?”,,, i.e. Why should the expansion of the universe, or the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe, even care that you or I, or anyone else, should exist? Only Theism offers a rational explanation as to why you or I, or anyone else, should have such undeserved significance in such a vast universe:
The expansion of every 3D point in the universe, and the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe to each point of conscious observation in the universe, is obviously a very interesting congruence in science between the very large (relativity) and the very small (quantum mechanics). A congruence that Physicists, and Mathematicians, seem to be having a extremely difficult time ‘unifying’ into a ‘theory of everything’.(Einstein, Penrose).
The conflict of reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics appears to arise from the inability of either theory to successfully deal with the Zero/Infinity problem that crops up in different places of each theory:
Yet, the unification, into a ‘theory of everything’, between what is in essence the ‘infinite Theistic world of Quantum Mechanics’ and the ‘finite Materialistic world of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity’ seems to be directly related to what Jesus apparently joined together with His resurrection, i.e. related to the unification of infinite God with finite man. Dr. William Dembski in this following comment, though not directly addressing the Zero/Infinity conflict in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, offers insight into this ‘unification’ of the infinite and the finite:
,,,Also of related interest to this ‘Zero/Infinity conflict of reconciliation’, between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, is the fact that a ‘uncollapsed’ photon, in its quantum wave state, is mathematically defined as ‘infinite’ information,,,
It is important to note that the following experiment actually encoded information into a photon while it was in its quantum wave state, thus destroying the notion, held by many, that the wave function was not ‘physically real’ but was merely ‘abstract’. i.e. How can information possibly be encoded into something that is not physically real but merely abstract?
The following mathematically corroborated the preceding experiment:
,,Moreover there is actual physical evidence that lends strong support to the position that the ‘Zero/Infinity conflict’, that we find between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, was successfully dealt with by Christ,,,
While I agree with a criticism, from a Christian, that was leveled against the preceding Shroud of Turin video, that God needed no help from the universe in the resurrection event of Christ since all things are possible with God, I am none-the-less very happy to see that what is considered the number one problem of Physicists and Mathematicians in physics today, of a ‘unification into a theory of everything’ for what is in essence the finite world of General Relativity and the infinite world of Quantum Mechanics, does in fact seem to find a successful resolution for ‘unification’ within the resurrection event of Jesus Christ Himself. It seems almost overwhelmingly apparent to me from the ‘scientific evidence’ we now have in hand that Christ literally ripped a hole in the finite entropic space-time of this universe to reunite infinite God with finite man. That modern science would even offer such a almost tangible glimpse into the mechanics of what happened in the tomb of Christ should be a source of great wonder and comfort for the Christian heart.
further note: It should also be pointed out that Special and General Relativity reveal two very, very, different ‘eternalities of time’ within space-time. The ‘entropic eternality of time’ revealed for black holes is rather disturbing for those of us of a spiritual persuasion:
further notes:
You’re delving far beyond my level of scientific expertise, but I will say that the basic premise rings true to me in a more general sense – i.e., not just quantum mechanics, but all of science and knowledge doesn’t make sense without consciousness. To doubt the observer as an observer is to doubt all our logic, all our knowledge, all our equations and experiments, because everything we discover is dependent upon somebody somewhere subjectively discovering it.