Hi Christopher. there are two sources you can find this. It was retitled on biologos. The work was done with Gordon Simons as co-author. Biologos site Wigner’s friend And on my blog Quantum Soul
It is long, not easy but, I ran it past my preacher, non-scientist son and he could understand it. We had to cover all the issue. There is another items on my blog indicating that consciousness isn’t subject to the laws of physcis and might be easier. Here The Quantum Soul/Wigner’s friend I conceived the week after my cancer got to my bones. I have looked upon that as a cheer up card, because when you know you are going to die, one would like a bit of assurance that you go somewhere else, and materialism leaves us a very bleak world.
I don’t know how it is connected. I only know it is there. I can’t even get from the immateriality of the soul any theology to go along with that data. It is, therefore, only the briefest glimpse into the next world from the data of this one. Eastern religions attach their theology to it, I attach Christian theology to it, but in both cases that is done buy faith.
One of the significant differences between us an animals is that our vocalizations come from the neocortex and theirs from the emotional centers. I think this is related to our language ability but how we made that jump is not clear, not even to anthropologists. Two quotes from guys who don’t want a creationist explanation for our language.
"Even the seat of human language in the brain is special. The vocal calls of primates are controlled not by their cerebral cortex but by phylogenetically older neural structures in the brain stem and limbic system, structures that are heavily involved in emotion. Human vocalizations other than language, like sobbing, laughing, moaning, and shouting in pain, are also controlled subcortically. Subcortical structures even control the swearing that follows the arrival of a hammer on a thumb, that emerges as an involuntary tic in Tourette’s syndrome, and that can survive as Broca’s aphasics’ only speech. Genuine language, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is seated in the cerebral cortex, primarily the left perisylvian region."Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 334
“*How could we move from communication systems in nonhuman primates to human language *
in a manner consistent with evolutionary principles? Arguments that humans are fundamentally different from nonhuman animals either set the stage for creationist explanations or simply avoid the attempt to develop a persuasive evolutionary argument. Bickerton’s proposal of a single gene mutation is, I think, too simplistic.” Steve Bradt, “Nonhuman primates appear capable of understanding only very basic grammatical structures,” Harvard University Gazette, Jan 22, 2004
We have some very different software add ons from the rest of the animal kingdom. What it means is up to the individual. One can have faith that evolution did it, or engage in creationist explanations. materialists would be horrified at that but there is no data either way and no evolutionary pathway has yet been proposed. Maybe it will be maybe it won’t.
My view is that the spiritual realm is not imaginable by us. Dogs, when leashed to a pole may wonder around the pole one way or the other, but eventually have his neck at the pole because the leash is wrapped around the pole. It doesn’t occur to him to reverse course. He will sit there an whimper. It is outside his cognitive ability. I have often wondered if we humans are not the same way–failing to sense, or understand the true nature of this universe. Yes, science has brought us far, but there are fundamental mis-matches between gravity and quantum which seem insuperable. We should keep trying to solve those things but it is possible our leash has wrapped around the pole and we can’t figure out how to go the other direction.