“The science of sexual reproduction is as much settled science as is the fact that the Earth orbits the sun and that DNA carries genetic code.” – Egnor
Tag: Michael Egnor
Michael Egnor at Mind Matters News: Political website’s Christmas gift to readers: promoting abortion
Egnor: I do a fair amount of prenatal counseling. While I always tell the families the truth about their baby’s prognosis, most of the patients I evaluate are essentially normal babies who have prenatal ultrasound/MRI findings that show minor brain variants that don’t impact their lives. Even for children with serious diagnoses, the outlook is often much better than the abortion-happy medical profession tells families in crisis.
At Mind Matters News: Does superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will?
Michael Egnor: If we lack free will, we have no justification whatsoever to even believe that we lack free will. In a timeless block however, the future exists simultaneously with the past and present — but that does not mean that the future determines the past and present.
At Mind Matters News: Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God. Who is that God?
In a discussion with Solms, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor argues that it makes more sense to see God as a Person than as a personification of nature.
At Mind Matters News: Does science disprove free will? A physicist says no
Apart from simple laws governing neurons, we have no clue what laws the mind follows, though it does show complex nonlinear dynamics.
At Mind Matters News: Why so many neuroscientists are unreflective materialists
In his chapter of a new anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021), neurosurgeon Michael Egnor looks at the growing evidence that the mind is not simply what the brain does and defends a dualist view.
At Mind Matters News: Can wholly random processes produce information?
Marks: We showed that in all cases, that yes, [design] was required, and that there’s mathematics behind it. The mathematics is based on the No Free Lunch Theorem, which was popularized in the IEEE transactions on evolutionary computing in 1997. There, David Wolpert and W. G. Macready showed something which astonished the area of genetic programming and evolutionary programming.
At Mind Matters News: How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust?
Egnor: Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist.
At Mind Matters News: Neuroscientist: Mind is not just brain? That’s career limiting!
Neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that clinical experience supports a non-materialist view of the mind but that the establishment doesn’t.
At Mind Matters News: 2. Neurosurgeon and neuropsychologist agree: Brain is not mind
Egnor saw patients who didn’t have most of their frontal lobes who were completely conscious, “in fact, rather pleasant, bright people.”
At Mind Matters News: The brain stem, not the prefrontal cortex, may be the seat of consciousness
Neuropsychologist Mark Solms: a lot of evidence, suggests that the source of consciousness in the brain is in fact in the brain stem, which is a much more ancient, much more primitive structure that we share, not only with all other primates and all other mammals, but in fact, with all vertebrates.
At Mind Matters News: Does creativity just mean Bigger Data? Or something else?
The problem with getting AI to understand causation, as opposed to mere correlation, has led to many spurious correlations in data driven papers.
At Mind Matters News: How information becomes everything, including life
Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room.
Laszlo Bencze responds to the view that evil is the absence of good
Bencze: I have found that all people, even diehard progressives,agree that there are some things that are prohibited. They might balk at homophobia. Surely that can’t be permitted? … So, if not all things are permitted, then, logically speaking, god must exist. In this way the existence of evil points to god.
Egnor vs. Dillahunty: 11. Is evil in the world simply the absence of good?
Egnor: “The Thomistic understanding of evil is that it’s an absence of good. It’s not a thing that exist independently in itself. It’s a deficit of goodness. God’s creation necessarily fall short of goodness because if he created something perfectly good, He would just be creating himself. “