Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Michael Egnor

At Mind Matters News: A reader asks: Is it true that there is no self?

Michael Egnor replies, “The assertion that self is an illusion is not even wrong — it’s self-refuting, like saying “I don’t exist” or “Misery is green” Read More ›

Michael Egnor asks if materialist neuroscience is an unwitting Sokal hoax

Egnor thinks that while physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed postmodern journals (the famous Sokal hoax. of 1996), materialists like Francis Crick (1916–2004) seem to hoax themselves. Read More ›

Avi Loeb suggests that the design of life might have been a black hole. Michael Egnor responds

Michael Egnor: Both an intelligent designer (assuming we’re talking about God) and a black hole are supernatural, in the sense that they are not objects in the natural world. This may not surprise you about God, but it is also true of black holes. Read More ›

Michael Egnor: The mind refutes materialism in a rather straightforward way

Egnor: I agree that design in nature is an effective challenge to materialism. But I also believe that the mind refutes materialism in a rather straightforward way—and in much the same way that evidence of intelligent design in biology refutes materialism… Read More ›

Is Jerry Coyne undercutting his own argument against free will?

Michael Egnor: “Except for action of any quantum events”? I challenge Coyne: What in nature isn’t the action of quantum events? Certainly, every event in the brain is quantum in nature—every brain state, every action potential, every secretion of a neurotransmitter, every bit of protein synthesis or ion flow—is the consequence of quantum events. Read More ›

Why, as a neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor believes in free will

Egnor: "An intellectual seizure would be a seizure that caused abstract thought, such as logic, or reasoning, or mathematics. People never have, for example, mathematics seizures—seizures in which they involuntarily do calculus or arithmetic. This observation, which is as true today as it was in Penfield’s time nearly a century ago, begs for explanation." He offers an argument for the immaterial powers of the mind. Read More ›

Michael Egnor addresses an objection to free will raised here at Uncommon Descent

Egnor: [fMRI isn't decisive.] But fMRI is worthless in the neuroscience of free will. To understand why, note that fMRI has very poor temporal resolution. fMRI measures changes in blood flow in the brain in response to activity of neurons, and these changes lag neuronal activity by at least several seconds. Read More ›

Free will makes more sense of our world than determinism—and science certainly allows for it

Scientists weigh in on both sides but accepting free will allows us to avoid some serious problems around logic and personal freedom. Read More ›

Mike Egnor on why Coyne and Hossenfelder are wrong to deny free will

Egnor: Now let’s get to the neuroscience. Neuroscience has a lot to contribute to the debate over free will and all of it supports the reality of free will. There isn’t a shred of neuroscientific evidence that contradicts the reality of free will. Read More ›

Does a cosmopsychist believe in life after death?

Bernardo Kastrup: I certainly believe in consciousness after death. I believe that our core subjectivity, that implicit, innate sense of “I”-ness, remains undifferentiated. That’s the reason you still think you are the same person you were when you were five years old even though everything about you has changed. Read More ›

A cosmopsychist talks about the universe, God, and free will

Bernardo Kastrup: Well, there certainly is something out there that is independent of all of us as individual minds, and which seems to hold the state of the world when nobody is looking at the world. Read More ›