Can you walk like an Egyptian, too :)?
Thanks for the accommodation 
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What we’re really discussing though is "does consciousness depend on the physical, and if not does that imply that people have “souls”. Maybe that’s similar, but still a little different. Do you think a soul could equate to a strict interpretation of consciousness, divorced of personality etc.? If God could have imparted (strict) consciousness to us or not seems like a somewhat different question than if a soul exists.
I wonder if you could say more about this “oneness” quality you attribute to consciousness.
Also I think saying consciousness emerges from the physical is very far from saying it is entirely physical. Life too is physical with the physiological emerging from the chemical. But that isn’t to say that life is entirely simple chemistry. In the case of consciousness what we call our inner, subjective experience is in some sense the best exemplar of something that is the counter part of the objective, out-there physical world.
Cognition is present in some form or other in nearly all life forms. It is supported by brains for many of them. I think consciousness is essentially the first person, perspective of self aware cognition.
Please bear with me for posting this in such a rough form but I do need to get ready to go to the Y for a class in one hour now. Maybe I can set it straight later.
Substance dualism imply souls, and it is one of the candidate explanations for consciousness. Granted, it is not the more accepted one, and there are other candidates like emergence, dual aspect monism, panpsyhcism, etc. But it is still relevant to the discussion.
We experience the world in a first person perspective. If I was in a room with 100 exact atom-by-atom copies of myself, I would still be seing the room through my eyes, not theirs. To outside observers, there would be absolutely no difference between the 101 “mes” in the room, but through my own perspective, there would only be one, no matter how many identical brain processes were occurring.
As a biochemister, I do in fact believe that life is all chemistry. It is just that describing the precise movements of every single atom, electron, etc to describe something like a cell secreting insulin is already incredibly complex (although some people do have some interesting works modeling those things), so it would be just too absurdly complex for our human brains to model the entire physiology of the body in those terms, so we simplify things by describing them with other terms. Biology is basically just that, and the same goes for chemistry in relation to physics. In that sense, consciousness would be entirely physical if it emerged from the physical.
Yeah, but cognition does not explain consciousness, we could be philosophical zombies.
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I am not a big fan of the word “soul,” the meaning of which is ambigious at best. I prefer the word “spirit” which Paul does a good job of explaining in 1 Cor 15. It describes an existence which is not a part of the space-time mathematical laws of the universe and is thus imperishable, more powerful (not limited by the laws of nature) and not made of the same stuff (molecules, atoms, and particles, all defined and controlled by the mathematical laws of nature). Paul also says that the spirit comes after the physical, and I believe the spirit is the creation of the free-will choices of all living things.
But not only is the highly quantitative nature of life going to make a difference in the spiritual aspect of different living organisms (species and individuals), but I believe that the living organism which is most alive on this planet by many orders of magnitude is the human mind, which I believe to be a physical living organism (self-organizing entity) in its own right. Thus the human spirit is far more alive and substantial than those of other living organisms on the planet. But since the human mind passes on its inheritance by human communication then some of this may rub off on animals with whom we associate.
I dislike most of Plato’s ideas which are strongly tied to Gnosticism. I am more a fan of Aristotle but of course He definitely got some things (like gravity) completely wrong.
I am a virtue ethicist also – one of the things Aristotle got right. As for being an Aristotelian… I thought he was way ahead of his time with an organic philosophy which had a greater understanding of living things than other Greek philosophers. But I never accept any philosopher or theology without criticism.
I think consciousness is a property of life, but the question of whether the mind can be separated from the body is an interesting one. I certainly think they are conceptually distinct and thus separable in principle, but whether this can actually be done is another question entirely. The existence of the spirit is not the same thing. And the one thing the discoveries of science cannot support is the idea of a nonphysical puppet master operating the body. I would see the phenomenon you mention as having to do with the mind being more than simply a function of the brain, and more like something that lives in the brain. But you have it a little wrong. How much of the brain matter survives does have a considerable impact (studies show significant correlation there) – it is just that a lot of the abilities of the mind do seem to be somewhat transferable to different parts of the brain – possible anyway but not guaranteed.
P.S. and the posted article may simply indicate that it is the brain surface rather than interior which is the most important part.
That surprises me a little given what you said earlier about placing more importance on the brain. I guess you don’t think the soul plays any functional role in our physiology. Are thoughts also explained entirely by way of chemistry? I myself think thoughts, dreams and every other kind of mental activity is entirely made possible by chemistry.
Perhaps it is because I am a physicist that I believe life is more of a mathematical process – that is a process with a mathematical description which can occur in many different mediums of which chemistry is only one. To be more specific, we would use the mathematics of chaotic dynamics to describe a self-organizing process which has gained the capacity to learn and adapt (alter itself in response to the environment).
In particular I think life is possible in an electronic medium. And I don’t think it is the chemistry that makes something alive. Perhaps one day soon we will use the same biochemistry of life to design machines similar to viruses for a variety of tasks and I do not think those should be described as being alive, while I do think that viruses should be described as alive at a very low level.
And for another example, I believe that the human mind is example of life in a different medium – using the abstract symbolism of human language rather than that of DNA – meme life rather than gene live.
What aspect of life you think can’t be explained by chemistry?
I believe a philosophical zombie, identical to any living being on the outside, would be 100% possible to explain by chemistry/physics, and there would be no mistery about it no matter how complex his congnitive processes were. It is the existence of subjective experience associated with these processes that surprises me and make me skeptical of a physicalist explanation.
Didn’t say that. Basically I am saying that I don’t think chemistry is necessary for the explanation of life not that it cannot explain life. And more importantly that life is not necessarily limited to the medium of chemical interactions. But then I already explained this and you ignored it, so I guess this is simply something you don’t want to hear.
It is in fact you who do not believe that chemistry is sufficient to explain life. At least that is the implication of your declaration of belief in a philosophical zombie – something physically and materially identical to a living being but not alive. I do not believe in philosophical zombies, for think that life most certainly is a physical phenomenon. Non-physical puppet masters are neither required nor consistent with scientific findings.
As a Christian, I do believe in a spiritual aspect to existence. But in my thinking it has a largely epiphenomenal relationship to living things. In other words, a living organism creates a spiritual entity with the free will choices it makes, but that spiritual entity does not control the organism. I don’t think the findings of science allow any other conclusion.
Sorry, I was not trying to accuse you of anything. It is just that I know physicists with some unorthodox metaphysical views about consciousness (like thinking that at matter is information being processed by a universal mind), so I just wanted to clarify if you were claiming something like that (I.E. saying that the explanation for life or consciousness is more fundamental than chemistry, and not emergent from it).
Philosophical zombies would be alive, at least as much as a plant or a microbe. Consciousness or even brains are not required for life. I also don’t think that they would spend all their time vegetating because they would have no consciousness to “move” them. Just that their physiological reactions and thoughts would not be accompanied by subject experience.
Science can’t distinguish between a philosophical zombie and a “normal” person, because there is no apparatus to measure subjective experience. We can measure its correlates at best. So it is expected that it is not required for scientific experiments, even in neuroscience. The orbit of Jupiter is not necessary to explain DNA replication, but it would be fallacious to claim that it somehow suggests that Jupiter does not exist or does not orbit around the sun. I don’t see why it would not be consistent, though.
Would it be fair to say that you defend emergentism them?
And why do you think science is inconsistent with dualism? Keep in mind that I do concede that storage of memories and at least a big part if not all of your personality is probably attributed to the brain (which is why a philosophical zombie would be completely indistinguishable from a normal human being from the outside).
To be more clear about my position. I believe the soul to be a expectator to a movie being played by the brain. How much control we have over what happens in the movie (if any), however, is something I’m completely agnostic about. The difference between my view and epiphenomenalism is just that I think the soul and the brain are separate entities, and therefore that the soul does not cease to exist when the brain does. That is why a complete copy of me would not be “me”, unless my soul was also attached to it.
No I do not believe matter is information being processed by a universal mind – and no, I do not believe the explanation for life or consciousness is more fundamental than chemistry. I spoke of a mathematical description of a physical process for life and I believe consciousness arises directly although quantitatively from that process. In any case, I go with the consensus in regards to physics and most of science for that matter.
For me life and consciousness are pretty much the same thing. So I do not believe in philosophical zombies because both life and consciousness are a matter of physical processes, and if these are identical then it has life and consciousness.
If science cannot distinguish a difference it is because there is no difference. We cannot measure the subjective experience directly but the subjective experience has measurable effects. I have no doubt we can design a machine which therefore has no conscious experience but only imitates what we do as a product of software design. But I believe a modified Turing test can detect the difference (the tester is allowed as much time as the designer had in making the imitation). And I think there are other ways in which science can detect the difference.
I didn’t say that non-physical puppet masters are not consistent with science BECAUSE they are not required for explanation. The connector was AND. It is not consistent with numerous scientific findings such as the way physical interference with the brain can alter every aspect of the human experience.
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts (or not) with reductionism.
According to this Wikipedia definition, yes and no. I don’t think it just appears as a product of complexity. I think it is a direct quantitative product of the self-organizanizing life process – a process which is greatly faster and broader in scope in the case of the human mind, which as I explained, is something I believe to be a physical living organism in its own right, but in a different medium than the medium of biological life.
This approach has all the advantage of both physicalism in resolving the mind-body problem and with the effective dualism for explaining the dualistic nature of our experiences.
The problem with dualism is that is simply inferior to monism in the ability to explain things. This is shown in the repeated success of science in explaining so much: water, steam, and ice as three phases of a single molecular substance; hundreds of elements as combinations of the same particles; matter, heat, motion, light and sound as different forms of the same quantity, energy. Thus the monistic explanation of mind and body as two different living organisms in the same system of space-time mathematical laws, not only explains the inter-reaction between mind and body but also how they are different. They have a different set of needs/desires and a different means of passing on an inheritance to the next generation via human communication rather than DNA – meme life rather than gene life.
The nonphysical puppet master idea of the mind is inconsistent with the findings of science because every human experience is found to be dependent on operations in the brain – and this includes all the effects of subjective experience as much as anything else. It doesn’t mean that you cannot believe in a nonphysical entity being there, and in fact I do. It is just that it can be complained that it looks a great deal like Carl Sagan’s dragon in the garage.
However in the case of Carl Sagan’s dragon, we can say the reality of the dragon (God) is in the fact it is quite capable of biting you if it chooses to do so. The problem is if you claim the dragon will always bite you whenever you come near. And that is essentially what you are claiming when you make your non-physical entity something which operates the body like a puppet master.
Ah well in that case our views may be more similar than I first thought. I do not think the spirit is an emanation of the physical but rather a creation of the physical after which it has an independent existence. The point in saying the relationship was mostly epi-phenomenal was simply to say that nearly all the causality goes one way from the physical to the spiritual.
Oh and I did not say that a physical copy of me would be me. I simply said that I don’t believe in philosophical zombies. One reason is that I don’t think something physically identical would not be conscious. But I also don’t believe that ends can be separable from the means. In other words, the only way to get something exactly like me would be for it to be born and grow exactly as I have done during which it would create its own spirit.
I guess this means I don’t believe in Star Trek transporters either.
But isn’t mathematics even more fundamental?
So plants would have either to be conscious or not alive by your definition.
I don’t think that follows…if science can’t detect multiverses, does that mean they do not exist?
That would be contradictory to my claims if I believed that the soul has complete control over the body. As far as I know it could be 0% control, or not.
Fair enough as far as theorys of consciousness go, but it is just as infalsifiable as any of them.
But dualism never tried to explain those things, so how could it even fail? It is like saying that DNA fails to explain plasma physics.
But we have no evidence of the dragon in the garage, but we do know for a fact that subjective experience exists and that completely attributing it to physical processes generates some weird paradoxes. So it is not like we have no evidence, it is just that it is not conclusive proof.
But consciousness always bites when you come near, in fact, you experience it everyday. I would agree with your arguments if what I was saying was something like “when you die, you become a ghost and start haunting people by moving objects in their house”, because that is something that we don’t see happening and that we could measure if it did happen. But that is not what I’m saying.
Well, I’m agnostic about whether the soul exists before birth or not, so a view in which it is “forged” by the processes in the brain into a separate layer of existence is indeed consistent with my view. But I don’t see how that is not dualism (that separate medium would be the second substance).
Maybe it would not, but it is at least conceivable.
I don’t see why. If my brain was identical and attached to my original soul, I wouldn’t really notice any difference.
I guess we agree on that.
Not in a way that is reductionist, however. Mathematics is used to describe things on all scales, both the parts and the union into a greater whole. Indeed it is my argument that we have the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology because new mathematics and processes emerge.
I wasn’t stating a general principle or a proof, but only my position on the question of philosophical zombies.
But follow the discussion backward. I wasn’t talking about your claims, I was talking about the idea of a nonphysical puppet master (in which control is the whole point). We have since realized our viewpoints are closer than we thought.
I am not so sure about that. Anything to do with the spiritual is unfalsifiable, to be sure. But I have already explained that I don’t buy into your idea that the subjective experience is not scientifically detectable.
Boy! You really missed the point of what I was saying. My point is simply that there is nothing which dualism can explain which monism cannot explain better. This is because monism also has to explain the dualism. What I gave were examples. And here is another: explaining things with the old alchemical theory that world is composed of the elements of fire, water, air, and earth, is inferior to the more monistic scientific view because it can explain the difference between fire, water, air and earth – how they are different and why they are different.
Thus you give me your dualism and I will top you with a monism that explains everything your dualism explains PLUS explaining the effective dualism also.
Exactly! Which is why consciousness as non-physical thing doesn’t work.
But like I said the only difference between monism and dualism is that monism also explains the duality. Thus it is only a dualism if I don’t have an explanation of the difference between two in terms of a unifying reality. I haven’t given that yet in our discussion here but have elsewhere in this forum.
It is based on the ultimate unifying monism in physical science, energy. Thus I would call it pre-energy to distinguish it from physical energy, or you could call it the pure potentiality of being itself. Then I explain the difference between the physical forms of this pre-energy and the spiritual forms of this pre-energy. The physical forms are all part of a single mathematical-geometric space-time structure which we call the physical universe and the natural laws which govern everything in it. The spiritual or non-physical forms of this pre-energy are not a part of this structure.
Not to me. Conceivable in a fantasy perhaps. But not conceivable in the context of my studies of physics and my experiences of life.
You seem of have entirely missed the point I was making that I don’t believe it is possible to make something identical without going through the identical process by which the first was created. The general principle here is that the ends are not independent of the means. But if you did go through the same process then what you are really talking about is two people growing up in parallel identical worlds and just happening to make exactly all the same decisions in their lives – two people who are the same and no unconscious zombie imitation anywhere.
Perhaps this says more about the Egyptian’s preservation technology than what they valued. Brain tissue deteriorates very readily but the gut, if thoroughly washed and salted, and then kept dry, lasts for centuries. Strong emotions arise from brain activity but are most readily felt in the heart. Egyptians probably would have preserved the heart if they had the technology to do so.
Al Leo
Perhaps most of these brain/mind/soul problems become less formidable if we give proper attention to the power of organization. With proper operating systems and programming [organization], and crystalline silicon arranged [organized] as “chips”, modern computers are very close to behaving intelligently. But to really achieve artificial intelligence, (AI) they must first be trained on previously acquired data; i.e. they must be given experience.
Perhaps the same principles would apply to the simile posed above: If I were vaporized, could my consciousness be restored by recreating the exact same pattern of atoms in my brain? In principle, probably. But that pattern was established over a period of 90+ years of experiences, and that organization of neural connections is unknown, except by God. So God could recreate my consciousness, my personality, after I had been vaporized. But humans could not.
Al Leo
Sometimes a mind is more creative than the world can support with actual reality.
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How would you ever prove your thesis, AL? The Egyptians wrote about the worthlessness of the Brain. Is it mere coincidence that the brain is also pretty hard to dry out or to preserve in some other way? Or is it really? Couldn’t they have just put a brain in a bowl, pack it with salt and nitron, and cover it?
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As for the heart… here’s a nice discussion of the whole “shebang” !:
“Probably the most interesting aspect of the ancient Egyptian’s concept of the heart is that their ancient beliefs remain with us today, not as science, but within the very fiber of our emotions, our poetry and our song lyrics. When we refer to our hearts in regard to love, or any other emotion, we are invoking a living memory of the ancient Egyptian belief system.”
The Purpose of the Heart
“The Egyptians believed that the heart, rather than the brain, was the source of human wisdom, as well as emotions, memory, the soul and the personality itself. Notions of physiology and disease were all connected in concept to the heart, and it was through the heart that God spoke, giving ancient Egyptians knowledge of God and God’s will.”
“For this reason it was considered the most important of the body’s organs. However, despite the ancient Egyptian’s seemingly advanced medical and surgical knowledge, the heart’s role in blood circulation was not precisely understood. It was felt that from the heart, channels (metu) linked all parts of the body together. These channels delivered not only blood, but also air, tears, saliva, mucus, sperm, nutriment and even bodily waste.”
The Brain - A Side Story
“In fact, the only real function of the brain was thought to be to pass mucus to the nose [or an alternate source of some of the body’s stickiest fluids], so it was one of the organs that were discarded during mummification.”
“Probably to some extent, this concept of channels may have had some symbolism with the Nile. Ancient Egyptians were thought to be in good health if the metu were clear and without blockage. Disease was caused when a channel became blocked, much like an irrigation canal cannot deliver water if it is blocked.”
“In the final judgment portrayed by the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased was shown being weighed against the feather of Ma’at, a symbol of universal truth, harmony and balance. Anubis was sometimes shown adjusting the balance of the scales slightly in favor of the deceased, to ensure [its arrival] into the underworld. The heart was thought to be given back to the deceased in the afterlife.” [If the heart failed the test, the heart was eaten by the multi-form crocodile demon, called Ammit, consuming all of your thoughts, your memories, and your being!]
“For this reason, the heart was one of the only organs not removed from the body during mummification. Of course there was concern that the heart might testify against the deceased, so in order to prevent this, a heart scarab was often wrapped within the bandages. The inscription on the scarab would most likely consist of Chapter 30 from the Book of the Dead”:
'O my heart which I had upon earth, do not rise up against me as
a witness in the presence of the lord of things; do not speak
against me concerning what I have done, do not bring up anything
against me in the presence of the great god of the west...'
“The heart amulets began taking the form of a vase with lug handles, perhaps symbolic of blood vessels, from the New Kingdom onward. Chapter 29b of the Book of the Dead states that these should be made of seheret stone (cornelian), but they were often made from other materials.”
“So today, when we confront our lovers, we speak from the heart, and when we break up, it is our heart that is broken, in only another of many memories of our ancient Egyptian roots.”
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George, I joined the Biologos Forum to become better educated on the beliefs of evangelical Christians. In this I have succeeded, at least to a limited extent. But as a bonus I have greatly increased my knowledge of ANE civilizations, thanks largely to you. I stand corrected, and I accept that ancient Egyptians had little respect for brain function. That seems to be currently the case with some of this country’s leaders, who seem to direct their actions by ‘gut feeling’ rather than by reasoned deliberation.
God Bless,
Al Leo
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