Simple Question For Non-Believers
Offline The icon is of my patron, Saint Evthymios the Great of 6th century Palestine.
Before I get to my main question, I am curious why atheists are so bent on disproving God if He in fact does not exist? If He does not exist, it should be rather easy to prove. Bust since websites such as this still exist, is indicative of the fact that atheism has failed in its mission to disprove His existance. The majority of mankind: past, present and future, have been theists for a reason.
My main question:
Ever notice when your walking down the street how you will suddenly get an urge to turn your head and when you turn your head, you find yourself in eye contact with another person? This happens to me all the time. I think it is evidence of precognition and ESP. If man is nothing but matter, how can he know someone is looking at him when he himself is not looking at that person? You might say its a coincidence. But it isn't. Next time it happens to you, pay close attention to it. You'll be walking down the street or something, turn your head for no apparent reason, and find that someone is looking at you. It's as if the soul or higher consciousness knows you are being watched.
Professor Wilder Penfield, the great neuro-scientist of Canada, argues in his classic "The Mystery of the Mind," that the mind does not exist in the brain. He came to this conclusion after studying several epilepsy patience and other people. It seems the brain is a receptor, not the cause of consciousness. Like an antenna for consciousness. You should check that book out. He proves that the human "will" does not exist in the brain. When he stimulated parts of the brain to move an arm, for example; he told the patience to force the arm not to move with their will. The arm moved anyway. This indicates that the will is not localized in the brain. He gets more into this. Check out his book.
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator -- Louis Pasteur
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Nothing you stated refutes the fact that the "soul" and the "spirit" have not and cannot be located in the body. If you can tell me where in the body the "soul" or "spirit" is located, I would be appreciative.
Don't even try a bullshit argument about how they are immaterial and/or can't be detected scientifically. If that were the case, then they would have no effect on our corporeal bodies. It would also mean that you would have no scientific basis for any claims you have made up to this point about souls and spirits.
I think you're digging a hole. A reeeeally big hole.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
Smart thinking. It always helps to carry a spare.
This would be an intriguing statement, should you have proven the existence of spirits, souls or god. In abscence of such proof, this is a pretty useless statement. You might as well say that the spirit is the left testicle of the soul and the mechanism that receives raw sewage from god's intestinal tract.
I would be quite interested to know what perversions you observe today which do not have counterparts in antiquity.
Ah yes...the good old days of serfdom under the Czar....
"Green Acres is the place to be..."
Very deep-sounding...but for the fact that humanity has been living in urban centers for thousands of years. I'm sure the Unabomber would lend you his support, though.
Sorry. Again you're pontificating about the soul/spirit/whatever. And sure, I like classical music, but I wouldn't care to reinstate the monarchies of centuries past, under which such music was commissioned.
The modern world with its "concrete, worldly" cities and its "warped music" does have 1 thing going for it: Reality.
Strongly consider signing on.
There are no theists on operating tables.
You can't refute what anyone says...
This coming from a guy who cites a work from 30 years ago.
Oh please, you're so dishonest here. If you are really intersted then why are you citing 30 year old works and not instead at a library, actually learning about neuro science? Why are you asking on a chat board?
Can you just take a look at how dishonest you are... what you really hope is that no one can answer you, (to your satisfaction) so that you can go on, in ignorance, believing what you like.
If you allow responses on a chat board to dictate your knowledge of neuroscience, you can't be taken seriously.
Too bad you don't actually read them, and then read the responses from neuroscience as well as modern philosophy, ala Dan Dennet.
But again, your posts prove that you are intellectual dishonest.
Here's, let's demonstrate it for you:
Provide an ontology for what 'out of body experience' could possibly mean.....
Waiting....
An honest person would concede that, at best, it can only be an argument from ignorance ...
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
It would also mean that he would be without any ontological foundation, seeing as 'incoporeal' is only defined negatively, sans any universe of discourse, rendering the term meaningless.
But such minor details would not bother a person who's sole access to the complete picture is whether or not someone can write a good enough response on a chat board to peak his interest.
Anyone who presents one side of an argument, and then simply sits back and expects someone on the net to fill in their ignorance cannot be taken seriously. To debate an issue, you have to know your opponent's argument, not learn it the first time during an exchange on a chat board.
He's not digging a hole, he's already buried himself.
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
LOL. That about captures the spirit of his rants.....
I just adore these theists who are looking to learn about a claim, for the first time, while actually debating the issue...
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
Nothing in modern neuro-science refutes the discoveries of Wilder Penfield. In fact, it has only corroberated it. Please also keep in mind that Penfield is considered the greatest neuro-scientist of Canada.
The "will" cannot be located in the brain, because it exists outside the brain. It has never been found, and never will be.
Listen to this debate between Habermas and Keith Augustine of the Internet Infidels. The former argues for valid out of body experiences, and cites the medical journals I spoke of earlier. Keith cannot refute his arguments and facts. Scroll down and look for the Habermas / Augustine debate.
http://www.garyhabermas.com/audio/audio.htm
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator -- Louis Pasteur
18th or 19th century Russia, child prostitution, executions and or torture for petty crimes, an uneducated peasant workforce living in fear, is this a misconception about how good it was in the good old days, well it was quite good if you were the social elite, otherwise you're access to classical music fine art food and enough fuel to prevent you and your family freezing to death in those cold Russian winters was somewhat limited
Crime, child prostitution, prostitution, murder, rape, assault ect ect, are all on the decrees, although one may think otherwise because of the news this would be a misconception of the reality that statistics show us, we are living in a safer cleaner better world than any previous generation, this is a scientifically provable fact. not some romantic idealist notion of how good the past was, because in reality it wasn't
Submit to the truth and wake up to reality
Someone else may have a more insightful opinion on this (deludedgod maybe?) but I listened to the 3 part interview, and I'll give some quick thoughts before bed:
1. Habermas continually insists that in order to determine that no OBEs are supernatural, Augustine must make a case against EVERY individual report of an OBE. Allow me to raise the red flag. It's true that correlation does not necessarily mean causation (i.e. some OBEs being explainable with science does not necessarily mean that all of them can be), but it seems like Habermas is trying to say that correlation is completely irrelevant. He keeps downplaying the cases that have been scientifically explained and insists on throwing up cases that have been reported but that Augustine hasn't investigated and hasn't heard about (which, given the apparent number of cases, was probably pretty easy to do).
In other words, his argument of choice goes like this: "You've proven that 20 specific cases have scientific explanations, but you haven't yet given scientific explanations for these 1,000 others yet. So there must be some that are not explainable by science."
He's just being optimistic. While the high number of reported cases is interesting, it says nothing of their validity.
2. Habermas repeatedly stresses that people who had these OBEs are documented as having flatlined completely. No EEG and no EKG, and so on.
Augustine argues against that pretty effectively by pointing out that, unless the body has been cooled to very low temperatures, it is impossible for the brain to completely stop and then have the body make a full recovery. Brain damage occurs extremely quickly. He even cites that this has been proven through animal studies, and explains that the EEG only monitors a specific area of the brain and not the entire brain. Moreover, even when an EEG is completely flatlined, it does not mean that the brain is completely and utterly dead.
Habermas tries to refute this several times by pointing out that the medical journals have documented that the patients had absolutely no activity on their EEG or EKG. Why he continues to say this after what Augustine argued seems silly. It serves no point.
3. Haberman asks how specific OBE cases were able to see numbers on the tops of ambulances or on ceilings or know exactly what had been happening in the room, etc. Augustine says that even a brain with very little brain activity could probably still hear and see, and so many of the accounts are probably just the patients drawing information from perfectly normal sources. Haberman retreats back into the "Well you can't say that about THESE ones and you have to prove them ALL wrong" routine.
A lack of evidence against is NOT evidence for. Period.
I don't think Augustine proved that there is absolutely no such thing as an OBE, but I don't think Haberman's arguments were compelling at all. Your statement that Augustine "could not refute his claims" is a little erroneous. He did, in fact, refute a number of cases, which is refutation enough to at least suspend judgment, if not more.
There are thousands of reports of people claiming that they've seen UFOs or have even been abducted. Some of these reports have been proven to be false reports, explainable by perfectly normal events. However, we cannot simply say that since we haven't disproven ALL reports of UFOs, that it's okay to believe that there really have been UFOs. That's just nonsense.
This interview is not evidence for OBEs. It's simply two people who disagree about them. I actually thought Augustine made the best arguments. Habermas repeated himself a lot and talked the loudest. Not quite the same as winning.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
Augustine didn't refute anything. He merely gave alternative explanations. But the explanations do not corroberate with the facts. He even admitted that he was not familiar with the girl who died and saw her family miles way at home where she described precise details that later proved to be accurate. The fact that he even mentioned these reports in 10 medical jourdnals, proves that the medical professionals found these to be unusual cases indeed.
Even for the sake of argument that there might be a measure of brain activity in the core of the brain when there is technically no brain or heart activity for several minutes, such activity could not be responsible for the coherent and structured experiences of the dead person. Such limited brain activity in the cor would not be capable of producing organized thought patterns and structure we see in OBE's. A medical doctor told me this himself.
As for the other poster about 18th and 19th century Russia, your information is incorrect. Russia was a Christian (Orthodox) nation/empire. There were over 10,000 monasteries, and virtually everyone had a relative who was a monk or nun. The society was not perverse and artificial like American culture is today.
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator -- Louis Pasteur
Actually, it might have been 1,000 monasteries, not 10,000. I forgot which one it is. But regardless, both are staggering.
Typo from previous post: "Journal" would be the correct spelling.
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator -- Louis Pasteur
MSc, but it is not my main qualification, I also have one in physics, but the pedestal is reserved for molecular biology. I got a special combined MD/PhD which is reserved for students going into medical research, and the PhD arm of the course I chose to take in molecular biology. This comes in useful because it allows me to rip apart pathetic arguments against evolution. By the way, neuroscience is one word.
Well, you would have right to say that if you actually knew what my response was talking about, and you were versed in neuroscience. If you read it again, you will realize that I did indeed show that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.
I explained in extremely precise terms why Penfield, due to the times in which he lived got this particular problem wrong, which demonstrates that by your absurd unsubstantiated assertive garbage that you think qualifies as a post, that you did not actually read my response in full.
Or you just have a reading comprehension problem.
The prefontal cortex and temporal lobes. This will not help you since that area of the brain is very large, but you asked. However, this question merely reveals you are utterly ignorant of neurophenomenology. The conscious control exercised over functions is an emergent result of interlobal cooperation. So the "will" to move your hand might be generated by the synergistic effect of the parietal/occipatal system and the sensory somatic cortex along with the cerebellum.
The point is, "will" is a neuroscience interagency phenomenon. There is no such thing as a magic life force or spirit which generates it! We can prove that by dividing the "will" by making an incision along the major axis of the brain, since kinaesthetic, conscious and sensation control over the hand in question are divided when the side effect of apraxia results! Hence you are refuted: If a direct physical intervention manages to divide/affect this control, and reperation manages to restore it...your already untenable position is blasted apart! And being that you probably did not even read what I wrote (and definitely did not understand it) ...Here, I'll bold the parts in my previous response for you, as reading the whole thing might be overly mentally taxing:
Regarding the situation with the hand, I fail to see how this proves anything. The fact that you are ignorant of basic neuroscience is your fault. The fact that Penfield died before the discovery of fMRI is no-one's fault. Here you are referring to what modern neuroscientists called apraxia, a situation which results in a longitudinal divide along the corpus callosum in epilepsy patients, which causes the dominant hand of the patient to undergo involuntary movement and uncontrollable motor functions. The hand might undo buttons, light cigarettes, even strike objects without the users control. However, combined magnetoencephelogram scanning and neurophenomenology conducted after Penfield died in 1976 have revealed that this very rare form of epillepsy apraxia is caused by the damage caused to the medial lobes by the incision along the major axis of the brain. There are different brain functions associated with voluntary movement, the cerebellum for proprioception, the grid neuron array for mechanoperception, Acetylocholin-based Somatic and visceral motor neurons which run up the body's planar axis through the center of the spinal cord and into the Sensory Somatic Cortex. The incision along the brain's long axis severs the connection between the lobes controlling movement, with the result that different areas of the brain may at different times be able to command the hand in different ways, but since they are not connected, conscious control over it is lost. Actually, apraxia is often used to make the neurophysiological distinction between intention of execution otherwise known as Executive function (Anterior Cingulate Cortex), and actual execution. In other words, we can show that the self loses control of the hand due to apraxia due to a division along the major long axis of the brain, and although the kinesthetic sensation is there, the sensation of conscious control over the hand is not. In other words, your attempt to prove the soul turns around and disproves it. For this reason, most neuropsyiologists consider that at the supramolecular level, there is an electrophysiological event which translates intent into action. The general area which does this has been pinpointed by fMRI as the medial fronal lobe. Recently, neuroimaging has revealed the area of the brain responsible for decisional inhibition to be in the parietaloccipatal system. The damage or destruction of this system results in the loss of executive functional inhibition, with the result that the subject may lose conscious control over many physiological functions. But since the area of the brain responsible for action is located on the other lobe of the brain, the result of an incision along the corpus callosum will be in rare cases the loss of ability for interagency neurological control over such functions, with apraxia, with the result that a conscious self loses control for periods of time over the limb in question unless treated. The very fact that it can be treated in a neurological fashion hence indicates that you are dead wrong. Since the brain is a contralateral control system, which means that damage to the posterior medial lobe results in involuntary movement in the opposite function, the same for the parietal-occipatal system, since the corpus callosum is the link between these two areas and the subcortical synaptogenesis which develops when basic motor skills do, the exertation of control over the movement is partitioned into four areas. In other words, we are seeing exactly what we expect to see with an epillepsy patient experiencing apraxia under IET stimulation. After all, essentially Penfield was stimulating apraxia in a patient with a divide along the corpus callosum (you will note that all of this is mentioned in my essay). But there was no way he could have know this since fMRI hadn't been invented yet.
I have access and subscription to seventeen scientific journals.
Can we stop this now, please?
Oh, really?
from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6960612.stm
The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.
Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.
The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.
The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.
Clinically, surgeons might also be able to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away by controlling a robotic virtual self.
Teleported
For some, out-of-body experiences or OBEs occurs spontaneously, while for others it is linked to dangerous circumstances, a near-death experience, a dream-like state or use of alcohol or drugs.
One theory is that it is down to how people perceive their own body - those unhappy or less in touch with their body are more likely to have an OBE.
But the two teams, from University College London, UK, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, believe there is a neurological explanation.
Their work suggests a disconnection between the brain circuits that process visual and touch sensory information may thus be responsible for some OBEs.
In the Swiss experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles.
Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them.
When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.
The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.
Volunteers
Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.
And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their "virtual self".
Dr Henrik Ehrsson, who led the UCL research, used a similar set-up in his tests and found volunteers had a physiological response - increased skin sweating - when they felt their virtual self was being threatened - appearing to be hit with a hammer.
Dr Ehrsson said: "This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are."
Dr Susan Blackmore, psychologist and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, said: "This has at last brought OBEs into the lab and tested one of the main theories of how they occur.
"Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind."
Obviously, a scientific journal can only list OBEs. They canot cannot support the notion of a soul. Taken from an essay of mine:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/the_notion_of_scientific_or_indeed_any_empirical_proof_of_god_is_absurd
Science is an atheistic pursuit, and extremely naturalistic. We deal in laws, and most importantly, we deal in cause and effect, we work with a highly rational epistemology in which no magic, transcendence, deities or things which are “beyond nature”. In science, we deal with things logically causing each other through natural processes, without the anything outside of this. Our epistemology relies on things that we can observe, hence test, our empiricism relies, therefore, on our senses, and these can only tell us about the natural world. The whole point of science is to answer questions. Since God as an entity is almost always invoked as an argument from ignorance, it as a concept is antithetical to the scientific method. Its attached concepts are also antithetical to science:
Supernatural: Any scientist worth his salt would simply throw the paper into the fire upon reading the term “supernatural”. Science is a naturalist pursuit. When we come across a problem that we haven’t seen before, we do not say:
Well, that settles it! It must be magic!
No. We sit down and try and find a rational explanation for it. We almost always succeed. We do not deal in unquantifiables, incoherencies, magical beings, or nonsense. We do not deal in arguments from ignorance, and we certainly do not deal in Gods.
Science deal with what we can test, quantify, explain, define and conclude. The reason science is such a deeply rational exercise is because of this. Something can only be called scientific truth when it has undergone the most absolutely rigorous and brutal test. A scientist will present a new theory at a conference, and the whole audience will take gleeful turns trying to shorn it apart and blast it to pieces. It is a terrifying experience if you are on the podium. And should you survive this baptism of fire, then other scientists will try to replicate your results, and they are always trying to prove you false.
So, for amusement, let us put the God hypothesis through this process.
Theist: Science proves God.
Scientist: Really? Can you cite an arm or branch of science which proves God? Perhaps a respected journal? Furthermore, you haven’t, as of yet, defined God, being that God is an incoherent term, so your statement is merely so much gibberish.
Theist (ignoring this): But...look at all the complex things science discovers. These must be designed.
Scientist: No, the natural laws and mechanisms which govern the biological and cosmological evolutionary processes do not necessitate that such entities are designed.
Furthermore, is your conclusion testable?
Theist: What?
Scientist: What I mean to say is, is the conclusion that you are drawing from your empiricism testable under the scientific method?
Theist: Well...no. God is outside nature.
Scientist (feigning a pondering expression): I see...
Scientist: Do you have any quantifiable results?
Theist: What?
Scientist: What I mean to say is, have you done any quantititave testing which might provide us of some knowledge of this, er, “God entity” you are referring to? Perhaps, for example, you could tell us how much entropy God expends which each yes/no decision regarding the designing of entities, and then we should be able to work out how intelligent God is. We’ll start from there. Then you can tell us the size and magnitude of God. What volume does this entity occupy? What chemical state is it in? What sort of intelligence is it? Computational, chemical, biological, meteorological etc. What is its mass? What is it's computational capability? What is the evolutionary process by which this being came about? How is the information by which this being is encoded stored? DNA, like us? Another biomolecule, or is it a Non-biological intelligence? What are its metabolic processes? Does it have language? What is it? What is its physiology? What arm of science would you classify this entity as? The word seems to be garbled nonsense, but it does seem that you have implied this entity possesses intelligence. That implies biological, usually, or perhaps computational information physics. Which?
Theist: Well, I can’t do that. God is outside space and time.
Scientist: I’m sorry. I must have misheard you. Did you say God is outside space an time?
Theist: Yes.
Scientist: And, pray, how do you test for an entity outside space and time. Furthermore, how on Earth is it possible to measure the effects using quantitative empiricism of the effects of a being outside space and time? Extending this, the words event and occurrence make necessary reference to time and causality, it does no good to say that any supernatural entity could have any sort of occurrence or event, and it would not be able to control anything, being that it is outside of causality. And hence, there is no method by which we might obtain results about this entity. So your conclusion is invalid.
Theist: Well...
Scientist (interrupting): It seems like you are making an argument from ignorance. You are observing the natural world and have the inability to comprehend it. Hence, you are drawing the conclusion of the supernatural. However, this is an argument from ignorance being that you simply cannot test for such things, nor can you coherently explain how they solve the conundrums you are attempting to bring up. You cannot quantify your results, you have no method. You have no graphs, no tables, no charts, you are defending this conclusion from scientific attack on grounds of its transcendence. This is absurd. Either you will coherently and rationally explain this entity using quantifiable scientific terms and quantifiable scientific tests, or you cannot legitimately call this amusing exercise science. Unless, of course, you wish to register with a fake scientific institution, such as ICR.
Scientist (now with large grin): Also, is your conclusion falsifiable?
Theist (Snapping out of stupor): What?
Scientist: What I mean is, is there a possibility of disproof found within your claim? Could evidence hypothetically arise by which we may invalidate your conclusion?
Theist: Well, no. God is outside of space and time. How could we falsify it?
Scientist: But then claiming that evidence is found of God is a logical absurdity! Testing and falsifying are two sides of the same coin. If we cannot hypothetically disprove a claim, the reverse is also true: We cannot test it. All empirical claims are falsifiable. This is the absolute foundation of scientific epistemology. No falsification. No testing. No theory. Get out. The concepts of supernatural, atemporal, transcendent and immaterial are utterly antithetical to the scientific method and the scientific worldview. Your hypothesis is an insult to the credence and is a mockery of the rigorous academic process by which scientific truths are gleaned.
The God entity is:
a) First proposed as being a solution to problems as observed by empiricism on the natural world
b) Defended from further scientific inquiry (including the absolute necessity of quantifiability, coherency, results, testing, falsifiability and empiricism) by claiming it is magic.
If such an entity is outside space and time, it is outside all empirical epistemology. There is simply no way we could know about such a being. It is utter folly.
To which any scientist worth this salt would read and say “this is utter rubbish. Get out and don’t come back”. If God is not a quantifiable entity, if God is not an entity about which we can draw evidence-based conclusion based on observance of the natural world, or an entity regarding which we may be able to design an experiment to test for the existence of, or is defended by incoherent terms...then forget it. No scientist will take you seriously. You might as well march into the NAS and demand that Homeopathy be accepted.
Another thing which strikes me as so amused and so horrified as the contrast between science and religiosity, why the scientific method and the appeal to reason are simply so much superior epistemologies is simply how they react to a challenge to preestablished positions.
Science is an inductive, empirical inquiry for which there are no absolute truths and certainties, only measurements, theories and probabilities. It is, as such, an excellent method for determining the natural world. In fact, it is the best method we have for doing so. The word science merely means the observation and testing of empirical claims. Hence, to claim God can be proved scientifically is gibberish, since God is outside these necessary parameters of scientific epistemology. And yet...to claim God is outside science is also gibberish since the claim “God exists” is an empirical claim about the universe. And being that it is in no way quantifiable or testable, or critically, falsifiable, it is babble. We might as well just regard the whole notion as gibberish.
n other words, your statement about scientific proof of the soul shows utter ignorance. Science is naturalistic and can only deal within that epistemology. We do not invoke argumentum ad ignoratium (this is essentially what your argument is). Furthermore, you merely asserted that modern neuroscience did not prove what Penfield said wrong. Whereas I backed up my statements. See the difference? If you want to have a real argument, you must do this. Furthermore, as I said before, being that science is naturalist, scientific journals can only report on OBEs, they do not draw from them the conclusion that “magic exists” which is essentially the conclusion you are drawing. However, we no longer need invoke this argument from ignorance being that neuroscientists have recently simulated and induced the experience.
And for the last time, Penfield was not a neuroscientist! And could you please acknowledge the fact that I did indeed show that the will is located in the brain, you were just to ignorant to realize it!
Taken from my essay on neuroscientific answer to the M/B problem:
I wrote:
On the “problem” of “free will” and “volition”
The dualist assertion, as supported by the religious dogma it complements, is that the soul is the domain of all things mental, that mental states are a seperate reality from the glands and gristle of the brain (but then...what does the brain do? Surely then it would be vestigial, which is absurd). However, neuroscientists have been shooting those off like flies on a windshield. Even the most ardent or ignorant dualist will be forced to admit that there is physical and causal grounding for mental states. We now have convincing neurological explanations for emotion, reason, cognition, pain, perception etc, and those phenomenon which we cannot (as of yet) explain, we can at least to deduce the physical nature of such phenomenon (consciousness, self-awareness and thoughts). The deductions of physicality are obvious, you tweak a physical thing in the brain, and you get a corresponding change in mental state. An electrode at X produces a physiological effect at Y and a corresponding mental state, chemical X in neuron group Y produces mental state Z and so on. We have a slew of cerebrovascular, genetic, neurodevelopmental, congenital neurophysiological, neurotoxic and neurobiological diseases to attest. Depression (serotonin VGIC channel malfunction and limbic-cortic dysregulation), which causes, well, depression. Alzheimers (amyeloid fatty plaque accumulation), which causes dementia, senile dementia, which does the same, Wilson’s disease (accumulation of copper in the brain causing dementia and Kayser-Fleischer rings), OCD (subcortical circuitry malfunction) causing obsessive-compulsive behaivor, Lesch-Nyhan’s (autocannibalism and insanity, caused by a missing copy of the functioning hypoxanthanine-guanine ribulotransferanse), autism (miswiring of mirror neurons) causing, in extreme cases, total antisocial behaivor, inability to speak, general inability to interact with others, eating disorders are caused by frontotemporal synaptogenesis malfunction, hallucination by cytokine storms in the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, the list goes on and on.
So, in the face of 200 crushing years of neurological evidence, many turn to the icky and hopelessly unscientific notion of “free will”. This is appealling because the brain is a physical machine and hence causal, but “free will” as the name denotes, is indeterminate. Many neuroscientists hence reject the notion of “free will”. I am not here to argue for or against such a notion, except to say this:
The question of free will is merely the other side of the coin of consciousness, the existence of a being which is aware of its existence (subject/object) in relation to the world, and has a concept of “I” and hence is able to make decisions about the the world pertaining to the accomplishment of some goal. Neurologists call this executive function. There is a part of the brain responsible, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), although we are not absolutely sure of the precise mechanism involved. Regardless, we can be quite sure of the organic biophysical nature of the decision making process. As I explained before, this is merely the other side of consciousness, which through a series of very easy deductions, we can, as I have shown, prove to have organo-physical grounding. The “free will” and control you excercise over your actions can be altered, controlled, lost, and switched on and off by physical actions in the brain, as evidenced by the poor Lesch-Nyhan sufferer.
But the term “free will” implies your ability to make decisions is...free. It is surely not. There are a host of factors, both acknowledged and programmed, which influence decision making. It is a highly causal and determinate process, depending on the tempermant of the subject in question (which is partially genetic and partially environmental), the electrical signals which knit together to form your cohesive worldview, this is the science of perception, which I shall cover now, memory, the pattern-recognition engines of the brain, the precise neuroelectrochemical concentration at time of the decision being made, and so on. There is no such thing as “free will”, because the processes by which decisions are made are as causal and hence physical as any biological process we care to name. The dichotomy we must entertain is this: Is there a “you” commanding and controlling your thoughts, or are “you” the sum total of your thoughts? Most of neuroscience, as do I, lean towards the latter. There is no mental control room, and it is most certainly not external of the brain. You cannot control your thoughts. Try it. You are your thoughts, and these thoughts are caused by....a guess, anyone? I would suspect, along with the bulk of evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists, that the subject/object self-perception of higher organisms which generates the illusion of “free will” is a by product of the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex along the Pan/Homo genus. After all, humans are not the only animals to possess this capability, although ours is certainly most fine-tuned. At present, great apes, chimps, macques and dolphins are also among this small set of organisms which acknowledge their existence as a defined being from the world they inhabit, and hence they do not behave like mere automata, as Descartes would have us believe.
In preperation for the next section of discussion, we must turn the science of perception. In scientific terms, this is the mechanism by which the electrical signals from the external and internal world are arrayed and read to assemble a picture of reality for the brain to interpret. That’s what the brain does, it runs a first-class simulation of reality.
This simulation is based on thousands and thousands of data hard points inside and outside the body. First, there are the five exoperceptive senses, which we all know, sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which depend, respectively, on the eyes and optic, trochlear, abducent and oculomotor nerves, the olfactory and glassopharyngeal nerves, the tongue and hypoglossal nerve, the thousands of recepter neurons across the body and the auditory and vestibulocochlear nerves.
Then, there are the lesser known, but equally important introperceptive senses, which regulate balance and spatiotemporal relative position and geometric orientation in the world (inner ear and cochlear tubes) called proprioception, the tracking of movement and muscle memory called mechanoperception (this one is quite remarkable, it is controlled by grid neurons which array a lattice-like projection of external reality, dividing it into grid squares, such that grid neurons corresponding to said squares fire when movement is detected in said squares. Obviously, your brain does not project this onto your vision, as that would be extremely annoying. As a matter of fact, your brain, while efficiently organizing reality, tweaks a lot of things so as not to appear unsettling. For example, the eyes never stop moving, they, even when fixed on a point, are making a jerky motion called sacchares. However, this is extremely unsettling in appearance so the brain eliminates it from the visual projection. It can be detected only by watching someone else’s eyes in the mirror.
There are many introperceptive senses, but they keep inventing new ones as they are discovered, so I shall not mention them all here. The point is that the simulation which the brain runs based on this data is the fundamental requisite of existence for a conscious mind. The mind cannot exist without it. For some hitherto unexplained reason, perhaps psuedo-therepautical, the wealthy sometimes pay to be placed for short periods of time in a total sensory deprivation tank. This is dangerous. Overexposure to total sensory deprivation will cause insanity then death. The sensory processing units of the brain will begin to unravel, as experiments have shown. Imagine a person born more unfortunate than Helen Keller. Not only are they congenitally blind and deaf, but they have CIPA (Congenital insensity to pain with anhidrosis) and ageusia. If I presented this case to a neuroscientist, they would say the baby would die soon after exiting the womb, assuming it has not been born stillborn. The mind cannot exist without the senses.
In addition to the senses and the genetic factors of temperament and chemical concentration across the VGIC arrays, the mind cannot exist without the brain’s pattern recognition engines, without which we would be somewhat like Dory the fish in Finding Nemo, except that in addition to constantly forgetting our own name, we would be unable to walk, talk, or think at all.
Born without a brain
Of the most ludicrous attempts to prove the existence of the “soul”, surely, the so-called “born without a brain” is one of them.
Of course, it is possible to be born without a brain. The precursor to the neural clusters of the brain are called neural tubes, which open and develop around 25 weeks into embryonic development, and partition along the brain’s major longitudinal axis into the four major partitions (prosencephalon, mesencephalon, rhombencephalon and the cerebrospinal fluid duct. The first three then split again into the brain’s sub-partitioning, the prosencephalon develops along the optic ducts and into the precursor of the cerebrum, which contains all of the higer-level functions and partitions (temporal lobe, occipatal lobe, prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe), and the rest develops into the sub-structures of the primary and secondary tiers of the brain, the midbrain, the fluid ducts that run between the lobes, the pons medullas and hypothalamus, the cerebellum and the brain stem.
To be born without a brain is a classed neural tube defect, which occurs around 26 weeks of human embryonic development, with the failed closure of the neural tubes. The most serious of these is called anencephaly. An anencephalactic baby has no isocortex or cerebral hemisphere, in short, they are missing 85% of their brain, the part necessary for higher-level brain function.
Very few anencephelactic babies are born, since it can be detected in utero, and nearly all mothers who learn of the baby’s condition choose to abort it, many of those who are born are stillborn. A very tiny portion remain alive. It is possible to be alive in an anencephelactic state since the brain stem is present, and hence the cardioregulatory center, so the heart will beat. Eventually, however, with no brain, the body will die very quickly (Morpheus, in the Matrix, my favorite film, was correct when he said “the body cannot live without the mind”) the record, I believe, for an anencephelatic baby is one week outside of the womb.
Unsurprisingly, an anencephaltic baby is in a permanent vegetative state, unable to feel pain, unconscious, blind, deaf and dumb. In short, there is no higher level function to speak of. No consciousness develops, no mind etc. They just...exist, although there is no “I” to speak of in an anencephelactic baby.
Anencephaly is not to be confused with a much, much rarer condition called Acephaly, which is the absence of the entire head of a parasitic twin fetus, which appallingly, can survive for a few hours by leeching blood from the heart of its twin.
So, having read the two sections above regarding free will and NTDs, we reach an incredibly obvious conclusion. The conscious mind is not a separate agent from the reality it inhabits (recall especially the section on sensory deprivation and its resulting effect). The ancient Egyptians actually believed the brain to be vestigial. Such ignorance!
Also, conscious awareness, creativity, intelligence, etc. These are functions which develop via the interactive existence of the brain and the world. It is absurd to say that they are somehow separate or come “pre-packaged” in this nonsensical and ridiculous “ether” which is somehow “injected” into the zygote or foetus (whichever, apparently, depends on whether you are Catholic or Protestant. I am trying very hard not to laugh as I write this). They depend on and build from the subject/object nature of human existence, which is why, as I have previously explained, they cannot exist in a baby born with no sensory functions (which would die soon after assuming it survived in utero). It makes no sense to pin these functions on the existence of this magical nonsense being that they are no more separate functions from the physical brain than the liver is separate from the rest of the body, as 200 years of neuroscience confirms. Hence, as I have already exhaustively iterated with countless case studies, diseases, experiments ad infinitum, it is utterly absurd to claim that the mind is a separate agent from the reality it inhabits, which of course, means that there is no soul, being that the mind is not a disembodied entity, which of course, implies naturalism. This in turn, is a direct challenge to the idiocy of theism, since God is claimed to be a disembodied mind, which I have cast serious doubt upon here (or rather, not I, but 200 years of neuroscience).
So, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is indeed a non-physical and non-biological existence for the human conscious mind. As I have shown over and over again, even if such a being did exist, there must logically be some mechanism by which it interacts with the spatio-temporal, material, 1.3 kilos of grey stuff that reside between your ears and the neuroelectrochemical signals which it produces. It cannot exist independently of it. This is totally contradictory to the dualistic worldview and the 2000 years of religious dogma which take up the same position. It also casts impossibility on the notion of life after the death of the brain. But it is surely absurd to claim two such different entities could interact. Non-physical implies no spatial location (x,y,z) and hence, according to general relitivity, no temporal existence either, hence, it is utterly absurd to claim such a mysterious entity could possibly be responsible for any mental function, all of which, including decision-making (a more scientific approximate of the rather silly notion of free will) depend on causality and are hence spatiotemporal. Obviously, we cannot, as of yet, point to a neuroelectrical signal transmitting across a synaptic vesicle and say, this is where “thought X” is occuring, and then go on to explain precisely how neuron Y is causing thought X and so on. but that is merely because we do not fully understand it. The precise relationship between neuroelectrical activity and decision-making and thoughts is not understood, although it may be in time. At present it remains one of the “big ten” Unsolved Problems of Neuroscience. My job is not to provide an answer to that question, but rather to the much more simple statement “Neural activity is causing thought X”. The obvious problem regarding the brain and the "soul" interacting is that one is indeterminate hence acausal. But the nature of the word interaction inherently dictates temporal causality. What else are we to refer to when we say "interaction", could you give an example of "acausal interaction"? How do two things interact if one is not bound by temporal causality? Neither can cause the other? Does interaction not imply one thing acting up another? How can something act upon an entity which is not temporal when causal actions requires one to make reference to temporality? How can one make reference to any sort of interaction when one is temporal and the other is not? That's ridiculous. There is no trichotomy here. Being that the two entities cannot interact, one is vestigial. Either the brain or the soul. Care to guess, anyone, which one it is?
It is up to the nonsense-spouting dualist to answer all these questions, to answer the interaction problem, to account for the success of neuroscience, to answer the evidence against them from neurophysiology, neurotoxicology, neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, cerebrovascular pathology, neuroelectrochemistry and neuropharmacology, and to explain diseases, disorders and events which really should not be if their idiocy is indeed true. But, being that it has long since been debunked, I would be suprised if any stepped up to the plate and confronted the levithian of modern neuroscience- if you are foolish enough to do so...then good luck, and I await your response!
For more on OBE simulation (by the way, this was published in the AAAS journal Science of which I am a subscriber and is the most prestigious academic science journal in the world):
A neuroscientist working at UCL (University College London) has devised the first experimental method to induce an out-of-body experience in healthy participants. In a paper published today in Science, Dr Henrik Ehrsson, UCL Institute of Neurology, outlines the unique method by which the illusion is created and the implications of its discovery.
An out-of-body experience (OBE) is defined as the experience in which a person who is awake sees his or her own body from a location outside the physical body. OBEs have been reported in clinical conditions where brain function is compromised, such as stroke, epilepsy and drug abuse. They have also been reported in association with traumatic experiences such as car accidents. Around one in ten people claim to have had an OBE at some time in their lives.
Dr Ehrsson said: “Out-of-body experiences have fascinated mankind for millennia. Their existence has raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the body, and has been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. Although out-of-body experiences have been reported in a number of clinical conditions, the neuro-scientific basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.
“The invention of this illusion is important because it reveals the basic mechanism that produces the feeling of being inside the physical body. This represents a significant advance because the experience of one’s own body as the centre of awareness is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness.”
Discovering this means of inducing an OBE could also have industrial applications, as Dr Ehrsson explains: “This is essentially a means of projecting yourself, a form of teleportation. If we can project people into a virtual character, so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications. The experience of playing video games could reach a whole new level, but it could go much beyond that. For example, a surgeon could perform remote surgery, by controlling their virtual self from a different location.”
The set-up of the illusion is as follows: the study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant’s head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one ‘stereoscopic’ (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.
The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant’s actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera’s view.
The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location. Dr Ehrsson said: “This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants – it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many of them giggled and said ‘Wow, this is so weird!’”.
To test the illusion further and provide objective evidence, Dr Ehrsson then performed an additional experiment to measure the participants’ physiological response – specifically the level of perspiration on the skin – in a scenario where they felt the illusory body was threatened. Their bodily response strongly indicated that they thought the threat was real.
The creation of this perceptual illusion stems from an idea Dr Ehrsson had as a medical student, when he wondered what would happen to the ‘self’ if you could effectively move your eyes to another part of the room, just a few metres away, so you could observe yourself from an outside perspective. Would the self ‘follow’ the eyes or stay in the body"
Dr Ehrsson added: “The illusion is different from anything published previously. It is the first to involve a change in the perceived location of the self, relative to the physical body. It is also different from any virtual reality set-up because it examines what happens when you look at yourself, and there is also multisensory information that triggers the illusion. There has been no way of inducing an OBE in healthy people before, apart from unsubstantiated reports in occult literature. It’s a very exciting development, and has implications for a range of disciplines from neuroscience to theology.”
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
No he is not! He was a neurosurgeon, for fucks sake!
That is utter nonsense. I spent 15000 words shorning that apart here:
What we can see is that the brain is a clear, tangible, distinct, physical entities which generates thoughts, emotions and mental states via neural networks in communication in a causal relationship with sensory integration. Yet the three I just mentioned are held by dualists to be the domain of a “soul”. The soul is acausal, atemporal, intangible etc. How does the physical brain, which, by the way, seems to handle those processes just fine, interact with this timeless, acausal, non-physical “essence”. I am not going into my usual modus operandi which dictates that I point out the ontological invalidity of this concept except to ask this question: What does it mean to say the soul “resides” inside the brain? How can the soul account for differences in personality and intelligence and the different conscious experiences that stretch across the human experience if it has no substance and hence no composition? Just what the hell does the term “a soul” mean when that implies numerical divisibility. To say that each person has a “soul” is incredibly silly since the soul is neither divisible nor physical, which means that to attempt to give it quantifiable property (ie one soul, two souls etc) is just ridiculous. The materialist can easily account for the differences in personality, emotion, reason, IQ, conscious experience for he is backed by 200 years of exhaustive research and because physically, each human brain is unique in its folding pattern, as well as the concentrations of neurotransmitters and fundamentals that compose the glial cells, as well as the precise structure and composition of the neural networks and synaptic connections. And of course, there are causal environmental factors to take into consideration.
The interaction problem was the philosophical nemesis of Descartes. But I am not here to pick on him. After all, the man lived 400 years prior to this discussion, I hardly think it necessary to refute a philosophical stance that no scientist alive would take seriously after 200 years of neurological experimentation flatly contradicting him, less forgivable is that Christian dogma has happily espoused dualism and the notion of the "soul" or "spirit" as have nearly every other religion, despite the fact that we live in an age where the extreme success of neuroscience in explaining these once mysterious obfuscations, at least to the point where we can obviously deduce the physicality of such things as the mind and the conscious experience. I would say that Descartes was wrong, but that is irrelevant, seeing as that's obvious, so what I will say instead is that the whole gamut of religions which espouse substance dualism are dead wrong. Christianity, Islam, the like.
I do wish now to turn to memory. Memory may be the closest to an “essence” of a person, although it is still meaningless without other areas of the brain to handle and process them. Your brain is constantly accessing your memories, comparing them, integrating them with your sensory functions and it is fair to say that if the area of the brain which holds your memories is destroyed then it would be difficult to claim that “you” as a person still exist. Destroying part of your memories will result in a significant dip in your IQ points. Despite the fact that the mind is the sum total of the communication of all of the lobes of the brain, it is fair to say that the hippocampus, where memories are stored, is the most important. And guess what? We may have poor understanding of memory formation, but we do know enough to say that it is physical. For one, simply destroying the hippocampus or part of it will destroy memory, for another, as I cited with synaesthesia, memory can be altered by physical disease. It seems the most important player in the formation of memory is a brain function called synaptogenesis, which is the formation of new synaptic connections inside the neural networks.
I now will introduce something called the knock-on effect. The knock-on effect is something of a cruel joke among neuroscientists. When Descartes first developed dualism, it was held as the center of everything. Perception, consciousness, the mind, thought and cognition, even pain. Descartes thusly believed all non-human animals were mere automaton, and this had some gruesome effects, since scientists back then were eager to study the circulatory system, and since they were now informed that animals could not feel pain, they happily nailed animals to planks and ripped their innards out for study. Any suggestion that the animal’s cries were of genuine anguish were laughed off. A mere spring driving the ticking of a clock, the scientists laughed! (I do hope that no scientist today would be captured in a similar sort of dogmatic frenzy, however, we must remember that this did take place before the scientific revolution of the 1700s).
Of course, today we are aware with exactitude of the chemical and physical basis of pain. Pain is a necessary survival instinct, and any organism which has the capability of movement will have the pain mechanism.
So my conclusion is that despite the mysteries surrounding the functions of the brain, we do know enough to say that they are physical, and what most people do not realize is that dualism has been debunked.
There is another, more brutal way to illustrate the physicality of the mind, much more clear than the cutting of the corpus callosum or disassociative identity disorder. It comes in the form of a brutal and most terrible genetic disease called Lesch-Nyhan’s syndrome. It is extremely rare, occurring only in boys and is an in utero mutation on the X chromosome, inherited from the boy’s mother. It has two distinct effects. The first is a stop-codon in the enzyme HPRT making it useless, this enzyme metabolizes uric acid, and the lack of it causes extremely high buildups of uric acid in the bloodstream. But the truly sadistic nature of the disease comes to light in the second distinct effect.
Most people do not realize it, because the situation rarely demands it, but there is no one “Other” that it present in the human brain. Rather, there are two. The human brain is triple-tiered, the bottom contains the primitive brain, then the brain stem and midbrain, and finally, the part where the thinking, conscious being is, the neocortex, the last tier. In situations of dire fight-or-flight, trauma, shock, or anything of the like, the primitive and primal lower tiers take command, controlling adrenaline flow and autonomic functions and instinctual basics, such as sexual urge. This is truly where man’s baser nature is, an ancient evolutionary structure, hopelessly unsophisticated compared with the deep intricacies of the neural networks of the neocortex, whose twisting patters of neural networks and glial cells produces all of man’s genius and creativity and thirst for knowledge.
Anyway, Lesch-Nyhan causes a mutation in the primitive second-tier of the brain, at the brain-stem, where locomotive signals are fired. There are two distinct effects of signal-crossing in the midbrain. The first is that a Lesch-Nyhan child is spastic and assumes an odd “fencer” position, as appearing with one leg diagonally bent and the opposite arm crooked backwards. The second effect is that the midbrain is deranged and the insane signal-firing causes it to “cross” signals with the neocortex. The effects are ghastly. In a fight between the primitive brain and the conscious neocortex, the primitive brain always wins, it has simply been there for a longer course of evolutionary history, it is more ingrained, it overrides the higher functions. Hence, the deranged vertical dividing of the Lesch-Nyhan brain causes the sufferer, during bouts or “attacks” when the signal firing goes berserk, to attack the people around him (always him, girls, having two X chromosomes, cannot get Lesch-Nyhan), and causes intense writhing and seizure-like convulsions. The most brutal effect of this is autocannibalism, the thrashing of the facial muscles causes the boy to eat away their own face, they will often rip out their own palate with their teeth and most of their lip flesh as well. For their own protection, they often have their teeth extracted. It is truly a ghastly disease. For their own safety, they have to be tied down with restraints, otherwise they will viciously attack themselves with their hands. Self-enucleation, removing one’s own eyes, is rare, but it happens. A boy with Lesch-Nyhan’s will not survive much past adolescence. Either from kidney failure or self-injury, most do not see their 20th birthday.
As a genetic disease, Lesch-Nyhan’s is part of my research into vector-based gene therapy. It doesn’t have much money in it, being that it only occurs in one out of every 950,000 births, but I do hope that the research done will alleviate this monstrosity of a disease. However, for the case at hand, it helps, albeit very brutally, to illustrate that the mind can indeed by divided, and that we can point to the neocortex and say, this is where the conscious, thinking “you” resides, not a soul. I hope I have made this point clear.
In closing, I also have multiple other objections regarding vitalism. First, specifically regarding the notion of the “Cartesian Other”, otherwise known as “homonunculus” , which is described in question form as: When we feel pain, what is the “I” feeling the pain, and where is it? When we see, what is doing the seeing? (The homonunculus is the idea that there is a “’little man” watching the images). Well, Firstly, neuroscience has overwhelmingly shown that the idea of a unified mental “control room” is bunk. There is no one part of the brain where consciousness occurs, no one part of the brain where personality is stored etc. The human brain is a triple-tiered structure partitioned into many, many different lobes and sects each dedicated to various different processes. Some are dedicated to vision, others to language, others to music, others to pain, others to visual association, or hearing, or auditory association, or linguistic association, or color recognition etc.
Secondly, whatever the “I” is, I can say with confidence what it is not-magic. This is, after all, in essence what the vitalists are appealing to, the belief that “I” is intangible, and hence cannot be the domain of the material. What is the thing that feels pain when jabbed with a needle? It is most certainly not a obfuscated vital force...you’re acknowledging that every time you have surgery! Furthermore, it may be best to flip vitalist objections on their head to reveal the absurdity of their beliefs. So, the soul is a mysterious, timeless, acausal, non-spatial essence? I would normally say that is a meaningless statement, but that is for another time. For now, I will simply say: How is it even remotely possible that this immaterial is the domain of the “I”? When your eyes are receiving photon packets and converting them into electrical signals to be transmitted across the optic nerve, how is it possible that this data, which is then reassembled into an image by a brain for review by the visual association cortex and sensory somatic cortex (obviously this is an extreme oversimplification, but were I to talk in depth about picture reassembly, you would all be bored to tears, so I shall press on). How is it possible that this distinctly tangible packet of data, physical ,spatial and causal, interact with this mysterious immateriality that is none of these things and that does not even reside in the brain (obviously it doesn’t. Terms like “reside” and “inside” are incoherent when referring to the immaterial). How can this mysterious ether interact with the neuroelectrochemistry. This seems like a reasonable objection, that being: How can this mysterious intangible possibly be a solution to any of the problems of consciousness? It seems like it multiplies the absurdity of the problem by several orders of magnitude. How can it interact with any of the physical functions of the brain at all? If it is atemporal, how does it form temporal and causal thoughts, or process temporal sensory uptakes? If it is non-spatial, how does it analyze spatial data, or interact with spatial chemicals that make up emotional response? What does it do that the material brain cannot handle? And how is it a more cogent solution to these problems than materialism? As I said before, seems it creates a gamut of extra, absurd problems. Human thought does not reside in a magical land that exists outside of space and time. By sitting at the computer screen and reading these perfectly tangible, spatial and coherent words while my prefrontal cortex and visual association cortex are buzzing and ferrying memories to and fro, I am acknowledging this.
The dogma of the soul suggests it is indivisible, unchanging and fixed. An “essence”. This seems little more than deliberate metaphysical obfuscation. And yet...there is no corresponding function of the human brain which matches with such properties (indivisible, unchanging essence). Consciousness and the “Cartesian”? No. The body tunes that all the time, and keeps it on a chemical leash. Despite neuroscientists not having a clue how it works, the body’s chemical pathways seem to manage it just fine...The mind? No. No magical mental control room of complete unification. The brain’s partitioning shows that the various functions which have synergistic interplay to form a mind are created not by a single unified essence but rather the buzzing and humming of many different areas of the brain, each with their own special task to perform. Destruction or damage of parts of the brain result in corresponding loss of function and alteration of the mind, as Gage shows, or indeed anyone with a destructive brain disorder which starts to override cognition, such as Huntington's. Personality? See below.
The closest thing to an “essence” of a person is memory. After all, as I explained before, memory is equivalent to genetics in importance of a person. There is a growing body of research which suggests that a person’s ethical conduct, moral codes and personality are almost entirely dependent on memory. But memory is most surely a physical process. And there is certainly no magic indivisible soul when it comes to memory! It is not stored in any one place, but rather all sorts of different memories pertaining to different brain functions are stored correspondingly. We can even take a picture of memory formation. Here:
http://gpp.nih.gov/NR/rdonlyres/927B29C5-A2BA-421C-BD44-B2CCD03F03B6/3330/daniels_mathew_figure.jpg
In short, there is no brain function which is indivisible and unchanging, and certainly no brain function which is the domain of a mysterious immaterial, atemporal essence which does not even reside inside the brain. There is no function of the brain, not consciousness, not the mind, not cognition, or personality, or memory, which is not open to change, damage or destruction by disease, trauma, injury, chemicals, toxins etc or simply the everyday brain functions like synaptogenesis or serotonin release.
This brings me full circle back to the interaction problem. All of the processes of the brain are fluid continuum processes which change appropriately based on precise arrangements of neurons and concentrations of chemicals and neurotransmitters. They can be altered directly using drugs, chemicals, or injury. They can be switched on or off by the body and by chemical pathways have a direct effect on physical health. By cutting the physical connections in the brain, one can induce an effect whereby the mind is divided. Yet the soul is acausal and indivisible, and also fixed and unchanging. The functioning of the processes of cognition, emotion, consciousness and the mind is antithetical to the dogma which surrounds the “soul”. We know have incomplete biological understanding of many of these things, but like I said, we do know enough about the neural networks and chemical pathways to rule out immaterialism.
The continuum nature of these processes raises interesting questions. Firstly, we don’t have a test for consciousness, which is problematic and raises ethical questions. For instance, until recently it was believed that those in a permanent vegetative state had no consciousness at all, until neuroangiograms confirmed that they actually respond to music, language etc (a neuroangiogram is where a radioactive isotope is injected into the brain which allows the neuroscientists to track blood flow to specific areas of the brain which in turn will show the amount of brain activity in those corresponding parts).
And in this essay:
Discusses why neuroscience has shown that a mind is produced by the brain and not by an magic or supernaturalism. It discusses the mind being necessarily generated by the brain, and points out that the mind being generated by an agent independent from the brain is a patent absurdity. Modern neuroscience has toppled vitalism and immaterialism and hence raised serious questions about the validity of the God concept. After all, the concept does spring forth from a time when men were ignorant of nature and hence invoked the supernatural at every turn. However, if we can show that the mind need be material, it raises serious questions regarding the validity of the God concept. As Paul Drayper put it:
"Consciousness and personality are highly dependent on the brain. Nothing mental happens without something physical happening." Now Michael Tooley, a philosopher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has stated five lines of evidence in support of this claim. Let me summarize just briefly that evidence. First, when an individuals brain is directly stimulated and put into a certain physical state, this causes the person to have a corresponding experience. Second, certain injuries to the brain make it impossible for a person to have any mental states at all. Third, other injuries to the brain destroy various mental capacities. Which capacity is destroyed is tied directly to the particular region of the brain that was damaged. Fourth, when we examine the mental capacities of animals, they become more complex as their brains become more complex. And fifth, within any given species, the development of mental capacities is correlated with the development of neurons in the brain. Thus, the conclusion that, "Nothing mental happens without something physical happening," seems inescapable.
But if nothing mental happens without something physical happening, that strongly implies that the mind cannot exist independently of physical arrangements of matter. In other words, we do not have a soul. And this is exactly what we would expect if naturalism is true. But if theism is true, then our minds should not depend on our brains for their existence; we should have souls. Also, if theism is true, then God is a disembodied mind; Gods mind is not in any sense dependent on physical arrangements of matter. But if nothing mental happens without something physical happening, that is evidence against both the existence of souls and the existence of any being who is supposed to have a disembodied mind, including God. Therefore, the physical nature of minds is unlikely if theism is true, but what we would expect if naturalism is true.”
Using my neuroscience background, these were essentially the points I raised. Emotions, thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions, data processing, and consciousness necessarily depend on the physical brain. Hence serious questions are raised regarding the validity of a God, or rather, an immaterial mind.
This essay is mostly about the problem of interaction. This was dealt with to some degree in the other essays but will be dealt with mostly here. Let us examine what we mean by supernatural. The answer, is, of course, that we mean nothing at all. I showed that here:
So, my real query is: What do we not mean when we supernatural. It is described as immaterial or non-physical. This has immediate implications. Einstein showed that space and time are the same thing, and physical things all occur within the fabric of space and time. To say they could not is absurd. Hence, the supernatural means nonspatial and atemporal.
It is for this reason that to say that the supernatural could do anything, or create or be subject to any occurrence or event, is absurd. The words occurrence and event make necessary reference to temporality, which means that they make necessary reference to spatial location. An event merely means that something has occurred, and yet, how can we make reference to something occurring without referencing temporality? Surely it is absurd? For this reason, the supernatural is described as “fixed and unchanging. Unmutatable”. Obviously. For how can we reference causality without referencing time?
Before I move on, I wish to dispel with quick ease the validity of the notion of “simultaneous causation”, which Christians or any theists may use in its defense. I have already done so in my essay on the absurdity of the cosmological argument, where I wrote:
deludedgod wrote:In summation to all of this, the idea of the supernatural doing anything, or generating any occurrence is ludicrous. For example, we might ask ourselves: What was the causal event which caused the universe 13.7 billion years ago? Nothing. God cannot cause anything at all. Cause makes necessary reference to temporality. For something to cause something else requires that they have temporal separation (hence spatial). The words cause, event, occurance, transpiration depend on naturalism! Hence, we have another objection to the notion of the mind of God: How can anything cause God’s thoughts? How can God make decisions, choose, act, do, or cause anything at all? If something was atemporal, it would simply be...nothingness. Unchanging nothingess. For anything at all to occur demands that we make reference to temporality. The mind operates within the realm of time. Your decisions are made because of a combination of factors which include real-time sensory processing, genetic factors, neural networks, electrochemical concentrations etc. These are all temporal.
This segues nicely into the problem of interaction. This is not the first time I have brought it up, but I may as well bring it up again. How does the supernatural interact with the natural. The word interact, again, makes necessary reference to temporality and causality. The words means things causing each other. But being that the supernatural cannot cause anything, or do anything all, this is nonsense. An interaction between two entities necessitates causality. Something causes something, an entity effects another entity. This in turn requisites temporality. However, this does not mean that temporality immediately means causality. Certain quantum effects have no apparent cause, but still need to occur within temporality. For example, alpha-tunnelling has no apparent cause (although we can compute the probability extremely well), however, it could obviously not occur without time. After all, how can we, I shall say it again, reference occurance without time? They are two sides of the same coin.
However, we should be careful with what I just said regarding QM. When we examine subatomic particles at that level, they stop looking like very blurry and indistinct objects and look more like probability waves. It seems that Hume was right. We only have the probability of something causing something, we cannot know with certainty the precise causal relationship between two entities. QM is very much the same.
We can examine this on a more technical level too. God is described as triple-omni. Let us examine God being omniscient. The literal meaning of this is that God can see all. However, I presume it means that God can process all sensory data from the universe, not merely sight. So he can also hear all, smell all, taste all, etc. He knows all that occurs.
This is ridiculous. It begs the question of how a supernatural entity might be able to analyze such data. The data is physical and temporal. We have photons, molecular vibration, movement, and electromagnetic wavelength/frequency/speed changes. These occur temporally. How can an atemporal being analyze them (especially when the word analyze refers to a temporal action).
Also, the word sight makes necessary reference to photonic reflection. We “see” something because the information from photons travels directly into our eyes. But it would be impossible for any entity to see all the photons in the universe simultaneously, all the time, since they are constantly diverging. How can a being outside space and time “see” anything? How can it process it? How does it receive the information? Surely, even the word “receive” makes necessary reference to temporality? The same for any sort of data: By what mechanism does God perceive every single “sound” made by every single material motion in the universe? Does it travel to him? Does it need to? Is God everywhere (omnipresent)? How do we describe God as “present” if “presence” requisites spatiotemporality?
I have already outlined why the laws dictating information processing (and yes, regardless of how theists squirm, being able to receive and act upon every single piece of information in the entire universe is indeed “information processing” makes the concept of the immaterial God an absurdity. We can conclude this, however, merely from definition.
All this, we are describing God as, necessitates naturalism. God is a thinking being, making decisions and feeling emotions based on sensory input? Requires temporality. God can process physical information? Requires physicality. God can do anything at all? Interact with the natural? Create the natural? Decide to create the natural? All requiring temporal interactions with natural entities.
Surely, then, it is also nonsense to claim that such an entity could control anything. Control requires a mechanism of interaction. A mechanism of interaction requires the medium of time. That is the definition of interaction.
All these things which we use to describe God: God doing something, controlling, feeling, perceiving, deciding, creating...these are all functions of the natural. They requisite temporal interaction and causality. Beings cannot interact without some sort of medium through which they may accomplish something, and our medium is the spatiotemporal continuum. If no causal material beings existed inside the continuum, then it would simply be unchanging nothingness. Exactly like a being outside the continuum ought to be regarded. Hence to claim that an entity outside said continuum would have these abilities that we prescribe based on a magnification of what we, who are very much material beings, have the ability to do, is complete nonsense.
So, if we describe God as an unchanging being, then why on Earth is God also described as having these abilities! These abilities which absolutely necessitate that they take place within the absolute referential of space and time which are so ubiquitous and instinctual to us would simply be absurd to project onto a being which does not share the attribute of physicality. God would simply be that: Unchanging nothingness. It cannot interact. For how can something “outside time” interact with that which is governed by temporal causality. In fact, how could it interact with anything at all? And by extension, then how could it process the physical data which would be necessary if we are to describe this entity as having the attribute of seeing and knowing all?
If God is an unchanging being this merely begs the question of how it could have the attributes of process, which is obviously, the other side the coin of causal change. By this I mean thoughts actions, control and any other attribute which falls under that umbrella(emotion etc.) surely, to argue for these contradictory notions with a straight face is nonsense.
Regarding an analogy, think of it like this: n physics there is a fundamental property of all physical entities...information. All physical entities give off information, whether this be positional (transitional, vibrational, rotational), energetic (photonic) etc . Basic quantum physics dictates this, and it is the existence of information which collapses the wavefunction into a final state of reality. All physical entities emit information regarding their existence in the universe relative to anything else, via its movement, vibration and reflection of electromagnetic radiation and waves. The EM waves in turn, are also physical since they carry information themselves. If we could actually violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and third law of thermodynamics and completely stop a particle so it was at 0K, with no motion and no reflection whatsoever, according to quantum theory, it would disappear, simply pop out of physical existence.
A side effect of this is that a no thermodynamics system of information may be isolated (this is why a fully closed system is an impossible idea). Think of Schrodinger's cat in the box. According to information physics, the cat will decay into an absolute state since it is impossible to isolate the cat as a system of information. Even a single air molecule escaping the box would break the wavefunction.
So, God, being an entity with the ability to process information from the natural words, necessitates also that God be a natural entity. That is simply the definition of information processing I outlined in the very first essay. So, to describe God as a completely unchanging entity is completely ridiculous. If that were true, it would simply disappear out of existence. If an entity can process information, it also has to emit it. This is iron-hard physical law. And then, it must be a natural, causal, changing entity. To say anything else is simply ridiculous.
From all this, we might be able to ask how is it possible that we may know about the supernatural. I might simply point out that there really is nothing to know about. Here is what I mean. For this being to let us know about itself requires some sort of causal event by which it could decide to so. The problem with this is outlined more below. Also, it begs the question of how this entity would interact with the natural world, which it would obviously need to do to let us know of its existence. However, I have already shown that this is nonsense.
The crux of this whole argument is that the nature of process requires it to be physical, since physical implies within the realm of space and time, and since time is needed for processes (which are causal by nature), then by extension, so is space. We can circumvent all of the icky philosophical problems associated with “what is time” since Einstein showed us the answer: Time is not an abstraction or a thing humans invented: Time is a real thing, an actual physical thing, which is part of a continuum called the space-time continuum.
It is utterly incoherent to refer to an entity without referring to the processes they execute. If an entity emitted no information, if it was utterly unchanging, it would disappear from existence, so says quantum mechanics (which is why Heisenberg Uncertainty says it is actually impossible for a being to be utterly unchanging, since one of the necessary truths of the principle is that even when cooled to 0K, there is still a tiny amount of atomic motion, otherwise we would know the velocity and position of the electron. To prevent the absurdity of the entity disappearing from existence due to this, genuine 0K is impossible). Now, obviously it is complete nonsense to refer to a being as outside of time as being able to have or execute any attributable processes such as the ability to think (sentience) or process data, or feel emotions (an extension of these two). The word process makes necessary reference to causal interactions between entities. It is absurd and impossible to reference a process happening without these things. Spacetime is the necessary medium in which material things interact. In a sheet of empty space time, nothing at all would ever happen. There would be no entities to affect the sheet. Many regions of the universe are like this. They have no matter (they may have dark matter, though, so be wary). To claim that anything could happen in a region of space-time where nothing exists except the space time itself is absurd. To claim that anything could happen outside the continuum, the necessary medium in which things interact, is the pedestal of nonsense. How can we reference process without reference time. Processes are sequential by nature. This is one of the vast number of reasons it is absurd to claim that an atemporal, immaterial, unchanging God could experience thoughts, emotions, sentience, process data etc.
One of the things I covered in the other essay (albeit not with this specific terminology) is the concept of ontological orders. We have higher ontological status and lower ontological status. The lower ontological status arises from the higher ontological status. A finger is a higher ontological status than a working hand. A fermion is a higher ontological status than a quark, and a quark higher than a proton, and a proton higher than an atom. In other words, the concept of an ontological status requisites materialism. Not necessarily reductionism because it can also encompass emergentism but it does necessitate that beings exist due to the existence of higher ontological status. Eventually, according to the grand unifying theory of physics, we keep going back and we eventually hit the highest possible ontological status, the absolute substance (or perhaps lack thereof) from which all is composed. A quick versing in the basic ontology behind this can be found in my essay Common Fallacies Employed Against Materialism Refuted where I wrote:
Quote:So, if we examine the dualist assertion which is necessary to make the God entity possible, they are:
1) The mind need not be dependent on the material.
2)It can exist extraneous of the physical
I have shown this absurd from all sides, but if we examine it now, it simply becomes apparent their assertion is that the mind is a higher ontological status than the material. But everything we know about reality indicates the opposite is true. The mind is an extremely low ontological status. It is an entity which emerges after the most painstaking evolution. I actually outlined some of the mathematics and entropy probabilities here:
The Absurdity of the Cosmological Argument
The point is that I have raised another reason why the immaterial mind is absurd. The mind is a much lower ontological status than the material. It as an entity is extremely improbable and can only come after billions of years of painstaking evolution. It cannot exist as some sort of “free entity” in the void, nor can it be an eternal entity, nor can it be an entity independent of the material. In essence that would be claiming that the “mental” is the highest ontological status! Surely one has only to open a journal and read about the utterly vast complexities of neuroscience and neurophenomenology to realize the mind is a deeply complex and painstakingly arranged machine. That we may claim it could exist as holding the attributes of “God” is simply ridiculous, if for no other reason that the mind is an extremely low ontological status. Hence, the invocation of a mind as a solution to a posteriori problems of complexity or problems of necessity is merely circular reasoning. I already iterated this of course, I am merely hammering it home.
Fantastic, but neurotheologists recently simulated OBEs. I would know, I recieved an email about it before it was published in the journal!
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
This is false. As I understand it, there is a part of the brain which places 'you' inside your body, and places your body in the universe. If this part of the brain is altered you can get the feeling of actually leaving your body. And apparently neuroscientists can stimulate this part of the brain (essentially, 'switch if off') in the lab and actually induce an 'out of body' experience. There are also cases where people have had an out of body experience just after an epileptic fit, if and when the seizure affects that region of the brain.
EDIT... I see DG touched on this above.
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring" -- Carl Sagan
18th and 19th century Russia
Peter the Great
Peter the Great issued an edict commanding his subjects to deliver their malformed babies to add to his pickled abomination collection, which you can see your-self at Kunstkamera museum in Saint Petersburg
Between 1703 and 1917 Saint Petersburg was built, a city built by slave labour on a mosquito-nfested swamp
In eighteenth-century Russia, peasants were not attached to the land but to the landlord and thus existed in a condition approaching slavery. In 1762, landowners were given the right to transfer their serfs from one estate to another, eighteenth-century Russia was largely a society of landlords and serfs. in the eighteenth century, there was widespread recognition that the. Russian gentry treated their dogs better than they treated their serfs, hunger and famine became the serfs' lot in life, making them even more susceptible to the ravages of disease and the cold Russian winter, eighteenth-century Russia experienced revolts by desperate peasants/serfs, but these revolts were easily crushed
? your happy idyllic Russia of moral fortitude, pickled baby's and malnourished disease riddled serfs frozen in the streets
But this is only documented history just say to your-self it never happened, and Russia was an idyllic place of nun's and monk's running through the hills singing the sound of music
Maybe he's using holy scripture to determine his vision of 19th century Russia -- in which case, who are we to challenge him?
There are no theists on operating tables.
Er... What about gospel rockers? Like the album "Fireproof" by Pillar that I was duped into buying by my ex-music supplier amazon.co.uk? There is both plenty of rock, rap and jesus in that little box of tricks. Obviously not every bible-basher shares your opinions on the nature of art and holiness.
Religion is the ultimate con-job. It cons the conned, and it cons the conner.
Mr.T : "I ain't gettin' on no damn plane [sic]" - environmentalism at it's best
To reinforce Devilin's point, just pick up *any* work of literature by Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) to see the misery of the 19th century Russian working/middle class from his own firsthand experience.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
PillarMyArse, I'm sorry you bought that trash. I was forced to go to a Pillar concert with my ex and it was the absolute biggest piece of crap concert I've ever been to.
One track still makes me chuckle : the one with the chorus that goes "you're afraid of what it takes ... to give it away". This could easily be a charge levelled at those guys.
Religion is the ultimate con-job. It cons the conned, and it cons the conner.
Mr.T : "I ain't gettin' on no damn plane [sic]" - environmentalism at it's best
Look at my blog! It's awesome!
I'm also on this Twitter thing
See what I did there? That was called a "poisoning the well" fallacy. It was a logical fallacy. What St. Augustine of Hippo (the Greater) did was also fallacious. It is called a "false dichotomy fallacy" since he did say that those were the only two options. This is clearly and demonstrably false.
1: Are you saying that your ears (or as DG said, the fusiform cortex) can differentiate between sensations instantaneously? That they never give false alarms?
2: Are you saying humans can't be predators of other humans?
Look at my blog! It's awesome!
I'm also on this Twitter thing
P.S.
deludedgod, if the technology that would allow men to have babies ever comes into existence, please let me have yours. OK?
Look at my blog! It's awesome!
I'm also on this Twitter thing
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346476
There's already pregant man
Well, that's not an actual pregnancy, but still pretty twisted!
Besides, everybody knows that the first man to give birth is going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.