In familiar situations we have already made the decision so this doesn’t deny making decisions and sure in a subsequent event of the same type one has already the prior decision to go on.
Incorrect! It says “Scientist and Christian.” It doesn’t take that much quote this accurately so why are you changing it to something else.
Pure nonsense! Atheism says NOTHING about the nature and existence of LIFE. Atheist is ONLY about the existence of God or gods. It is not my problem that you have replaced your faith in God with a faith the the premises of some dubious argument for God existence.
Yes they do. Not much compared to human beings by a factor of 1000 at least. But yes they are aware of both their environment and their own status as all living things are required to be in order to respond to their environment and to maintain themselves. Consensus decisions? Absolutely. The whole community works together.
Of course they do. Because those neurons are the means by which you make your decisions. This is demonstrable because you can interfere with those neurons and thereby alter the decisions made. Scary thought, huh?
Being a scientist means accepting the results of written procedures which give the same result no matter what you want or believe.
Apparently you have taken the wrong lesson from this. The point was not to give you the excuse to simply believe whatever you feel like, but to test things to see if they are true and that is what science does with experimental procedures giving the same result every time anybody does them.
Unlikely. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything we think and do is independent of our material existence. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a non-material or spiritual aspect to our existence as I certainly believe that we do. But it is not the mind and it is not a puppet master.
I am a theist but I don’t believe in this control freak you have chosen for your god. I believe in a God who has chosen love and freedom over power and control. This is why He created life, which serves no purpose when all you are interested is in power and control.
There is no magic wand to give things freedom of will any more than there is a magic wand to give things life (indeed I think these two are pretty much the same thing). Self-organizing processes are quite numerous in the universe, and what they do is not determined by either their environment or the laws of nature. This is the basis for the development of life in the universe. So if you want to know how free will and life comes about I would recommend studying what is required to make such processes possible. The answer is the space-time mathematical laws of nature. To be sure I believe God created them in order to make the development of life possible.
No that only shows that you do not understand the results. The delay is not in making the decisions but in being aware of your decision. But your own misunderstanding also suggest how other people can misunderstand this also and thus make claims that this means things which it does not. In fact your example give an illustration of this. This 7 second delay DOES NOT MEAN that the person did not make that decision. The argument is totally bogus.
However… I must admit to a little skepticism myself. I can see many many ways in which this delay might be overestimated somewhat. I am also skeptical that this delay is the same for everyone under all conditions. What is the standard deviation? I would also be interested to see if I can fool the machine in various ways. I would bet they are doing this experiment with people who are unaware of what they are trying measure. So… are they measuring what people are capable of or only what most people do most of the time?
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How does God give conscience? We act on pre-wired prejudice, habit, ‘morality’. What is moral law? What is free will come to that? Does God have either, or both?
God gives conscience when God made us conscious beings with love. Thus we are spiritually interconnected. We are aware of others, we have knowledge. This was recognized by the Romans as is evident in the Latin word conscientia , which means “privity of knowledge” or “with-knowledge”.
In Greek the word is Συνείδηση which can be transliterated as “together-perception” or “co-perception”. So here again there is relation with the other with knowledge owing to inner perception. And “inner” doesn’t mean within one’s self, but spiritually.
The ability to have knowledge of the other, and that is inner knowledge, is found where there is love. Love is a spiritual connection or spiritual connectivity.
We do have habits and prejudices and past experience that may become influential. However it is seen in many examples that if a humane person, i.e., a person with a conscience and thus empathy (a form of love) sees a stranger in some sort of trouble or difficult situation, he or she will want to help them, will try to reach out to them to give them assistance. And there have been plenty of cases where the humane person may risk their life to help the other, who is a stranger.
An inhumane person, one with no conscience and no empathy, may not only not help or even be remotely inclined to help the stranger, but may even get pleasure from seeing the other’s suffering. According to my late, psychopathic husband, there can be occasions where an inhumane person may help another, but he said it is out of self interest. They may want to be seen to be helpful in order to deceive others that they want to influence. And he told me this can be arranged in the case where they want to attain what he called “a human pet”.
I can give you my understanding from my own spiritual experiences in answers to the questions you put forth.
Moral law is a natural law that arises where there is awareness, knowledge and love between beings. There is no imposition of this law. Those that hold to it do so because they have love for others and want to uphold their spiritual integrity.
Free will is the ability / power to act without any constraint. One has free will when one can make choices, decisions and act freely, at one’s own discretion. A humane person is a free agent, so they have free will. An inhumane person belongs to / is bound to a mindset or what my late, psychopathic husband called the corrupt or evil spirit or the evil one. And note, he was an atheist. I suggested to him that the “evil spirit / evil one” is perhaps the evil mindset and he agreed. So we are not talking here about any spirits.
I don’t think we can relate these to God as they are human abilities effectively given to us by God in creating us as conscious being with love. Furthermore we cannot define or describe God. God is beyond our understanding. However we know that God is Just and as God is the be all and end all of everything that exists, then we can surmise that God is totally free to act.
Thanks. . . .
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Yes, I overlooked the “and” and my apologies for that but maybe it was because (I think it was you) you said somewhere that you are a scientist first and a Christian second or something along those lines. And that is sure reflected in your saying “The scientific evidence requires us to adjust our thinking.” In reaction to my comment about we are not meat robots. I don’t change my thinking about God. I accept or reject the science as I see fit. I accept the science where it is compliant with or at least doesn’t reject the existence of God because the existence of God is a certainty beyond the shadow of doubt.
I disagree with you about atheism. Atheism says PLENTY about the nature and existence of LIFE.
Theism and Atheism are ultimately worldviews. A person who is a theist has a worldview that supports a collective and unity, whereas atheism supports a collection of individuals and thus separateness. These have huge implications in what each will believe and understand about nature and the existence of life. An atheist sees life as some animation for a limited time. The physical is all that there is for atheist. A theist sees life as a continuum that surpasses this physical plane. The theist believes in an afterlife. So both have beliefs about what the living form is about.
Cells have awareness but not independently. For cells awareness comes from two sources.
One is the conscious being, whose consciousness (that being awareness and knowledge) infuses their embodiment, which is cellular at the fundamental level. When the conscious being passes away from their embodiment, the embodiment is left lifeless, without awareness. This is evidence that the cells individually and independently are not aware.
The other awareness, and indeed intelligence too, is of God. God ultimately upholds all physical forms, both living and non-living. So the cells may be aware of both their environment and their own status and may respond to their environment and undergo the processes of life because God upholds the knowledge (the fundamental element), with meaning (rules/ laws) in the Divine Consciousness. This is changed with the passing of the conscious being from their embodiment. So the cells are affected through this level as well.
While ever there is consciousness the cells do act as a community but that is with respect to their function, maintenance, growth and survival. Cells are not involved in decision making, not even neurons. The brain, which of course means the neurons, enables us to have physical experiences in association with mental events, thinking. This happens because with each thought there is physiological responses, mostly emotional, but not only emotional.
The brain and neurons, just as the cells in the body, don’t get involved in decision making. To consider that they do is to adhere to the meat robot model of life. The meat robot model, which is extinguished in death, the cessation of life. This is the atheistic worldview. My late husband, who was an atheist, used to say death is just like turning the light switch off. That’s it! So the community of cells must all decide “we’re done”. This is not the reality.
You said: “Being a scientist means accepting the results of written procedures which give the same result no matter what you want or believe.”
I disagree with you about what being a scientist means… Being a scientist is using the scientific method to investigate and discover and arrive at some deeper knowledge and understanding. A scientist may use other scientists’ research results as a springboard, but they may equally use their own original ideas.
Sure, repeatability of experimental results is important. However, that still doesn’t mean we have it all because science is a work in progress. Experiments can be repeatable but if the experiments are faulty in their design or premise then the results will not be consistent with the truth, even though repeatable. And it will take further research to reject them and refine what is “believed”. A lot of scientists talk about “what we know” but this is not the reality. It has to do with what we believe based on the evidence we have because that evidence can be rejected with new evidence.
The following are two sorts of EVIDENCE that what we think and do can be independent of our material existence.
There is evidence in telepathy, that there is a One Mind, a platform on which we all participate, and inter-relate. Otherwise telepathy would have to be brain to brain communication, which even at a short distance, with two skulls butted together would not be possible.
The other big evidence is not open to everyone at once. They have to go through their own experiences. That evidence is enlightenment. In enlightenment there is a sudden realization that one is not the personal self, which is the identification with the body and the activities in Mind, which most see as activities in a personal mind. The abrupt realization is that one is conscious being, a spiritual entity, which is independent of the embodiment, and the real doer of all actions, both physical and mental. The fact that physical action is done by means of the embodiment does not deny the doer is a spiritual entity. The conscious being is not measurable by any scientific method. And the say so that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist is just that, a say so.
I don’t see where you got the notion that I believe in any control freak as God. God has given consciousness, love and free will. Hardly a control freak. However, God is instrumental in sustaining this Universe and all that is in it. That doesn’t make God any control freak either, but the supporter and sustainer of all life, as well as everything else.
I strongly disagree with you that God made space-time mathematical laws of nature in order to make the development of life possible and as you said earlier as self-organizing processes. Inanimate matter cannot self-organize to become living forms and conscious living forms at that. God created life and sustains life by upholding the relevant information, which is in the One Mind (Mind of God) in the Divine Consciousness.
Now for the experiments.
The 7 second delay makes the experiments questionable. I have always been aware as I am coming to a decision and aware as I am making my decision, except in cases where there is past experience that has been instrumental in making an instant decision about something, seemingly without thinking. But we may instantly reject or accept something only because it is based on past decision making. I have never seen any situation where I become aware of a decision that the collective of neurons in my brain had made.
Indeed what are they measuring. They are telling people that they should throw a switch or press a button or flex their hand when they perceive that they “feel the urge or feel the intention or made a decision". This is where the baloney is to be found. No one observes a decision that was made by the brain come to light. So they wait and possibly feel they need to act at some point thus creating the 7 second delay. And this becomes clear when we look a the experiments done.
The Libet Experiment: Is Free Will Just an Illusion? - YouTube
From the transcript it says
“He also got them to record the time at which they made a conscious decision to move their hands disconcertingly he found evidence of brain activity initiating the movement hundreds of milliseconds before the conscious decision was reported. The time was around 200 milliseconds, i.e., 0.2 seconds.
A person would be hard pressed to be accurate enough to within a second. Hundreds of milliseconds would be well within the margin of error.
In this video Neuroscience and Free Will - Libet’s Experiment - YouTube where the Baroness Dr. Susan Greenfield PhD (a neuroscientist) is the subject
From the transcript it says:
02:42 the brain have begun to build up electrical activity in preparation for this willed action 2,000 milliseconds (i.e., 2 secs) at least before the action actually occurs just as in Libet’s original work
So we suddenly get ten times the amount of time needed. This is most likely the effect of waiting to make an intention knowing that one is going to do so at some point. Here there is anticipation which gives brain activity, BUT there is also mirror neuron response in the knowledge that one is going to press a button. And this mirror neuron response may well take in the feeling of using one hand rather than the other. That is still within the person’s intention not some action the brain has independently decided before you knew about it.
Finally in even more recent experiments the time before the intention has reached six or seven seconds mark. This is done by asking the subject to “wait for an urge or intention” to press a button or flex their wrist etc. Urges and intentions don’t just arise out of some void. Getting back to my car example, if a car swerves in front of you, do you wait for the urge or intention to move away? In seven seconds the person could be flattened.
Here philosopher Dr. Albert Mele explains quite well, this problem and many other problems of these experiments. And it is plain that he is not covering every problem. For example he doesn’t cover the problem of mirror neuron response. Does Free Will Exist? | Alfred Mele | Big Think - YouTube
Clearly what the results mean boils down to the interpretation of the data AND that is affected by the beliefs of the scientist. If they believe that we are automatons, then they are going to see the build up as the brain making the decision before we know it.
And here in the following video there is evidence that 7 seconds and the brain making the decision is wrong. In this video they asked the subjects to make an intention to press a button with one hand, left or right, THEN with a flash on the screen to switch intention to the other hand. From the graph it is plain to see that the intention to use the other hand was instant or near instant. No community of neurons in the brain has this capability, not even in the remotest possibility.
What this shows is that with the original intention there is anticipation and knowledge of some physical action to take place before the intention is made. All this involves neuron activity. This is being interpreted as an intention made by the brain by those who want to prove the meat robot is the go and that we have no free will.
To sum up the main reasons for the time delay and thus the evidence against the brain making the decision and the person supposedly having no free will.
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The subjects are “asked to choose to perform a simple hand movement when they felt like it.” A subject can be waiting to “feel like it” so there is time wasted here waiting to feel like doing something. Flex you hand when you feel like it could be indefinite.
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At the same time the suggestion to flex the hand can and will cause mirror neuron response. And with respect to one hand or the other. There are overlaps where there is mirror neuron response and where the experimenters claim to know what the person is going to decide to do before they consciously decide or supposedly know of their decision. This would be an involuntary reactivity in the brain owing to suggestion alone.
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“Note the time”. Note the time at which they made a conscious decision to move their hands so that they can record it later. The person will take time to note the seconds on the clock when the intention/ decision was made. So the action cannot possibly be instant as it would be naturally.
All this means that there is additional neural activity in the brain before they take any action and it can be explained when we take into account what is happening and how the brain / neurons may respond to suggestions etc.
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