Consciousness

In a move reminiscent of Tom Wolfe tackling The Kingdom of Speech near the end of his life, Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) decided to tackle consciousness: Consciousness is a hard problem for science, principally because no one quite understands what makes us the subjects of our experiences. According to one critic, the problem that has preoccupied Stoppard throughout his career is “Are the materialists right, or is there more to man than mere flesh?”: Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), the protagonist, is a youthful research psychologist-in-the-making who longs above all things to crack the hardest problem in to her field, the conundrum of human consciousness: “Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra….We’re dealing in mind-stuff that doesn’t show Read More ›

Because silicon can’t, says chemist: WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer. Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Cronin leads a research team of more than 50 people, but his childhood obsessions remain. He is constructing chemical brains, and has ambitions to create artificial life – using a radical new approach. Rowan Hooper, “Why creating a chemical brain will be how we understand consciousness” at New Scientist (paywall) The problem with consciousness is not that we don’t understand how it originates but that Read More ›

  Better than we ever could? Recently, we discussed well-known chemist and atheist proponent Peter Atkins’s claim that science, not philosophy, answers the Big Questions: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of Read More ›

Via Chad at Truth Bomb, quoting Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, …you can’t get something from nothing…It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry…How then, do you get something totally different- conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures- from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem…However…if you begin with an infinite mind, then Read More ›

Some of you may have already seen that Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, has been subject to a blistering review in the liberal US weekly, The Nation. On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent Religion & Ethics website, I have commented on this review, Nagel’s thesis, and the attempt by naturalists to present a politically correct face that avoids Nagel’s critique.