Sorry about the lenght but I had to cover the issues. I hate incomplete work.
I watched the video and found it poetic and some things quite cogent from a scientific point of view. When he talked about knowing. It reminded me of Peierls view of Quantum:
" The moment at which you can throw away one possibility and keep only the other is when you finally become conscious of the fact that the experiment has given one result … You see, the quantum mechanical description is in terms of knowledge, and knowledge requires somebody who knows. " Rudolf Peierls, in P. C. W. Davies and Julian Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p.74
We know something to be true in a way that, to paraphrase what Klax said, a bag of transisters can’t. Because of the things below, I must disagree with your statement that the soul can not be held up as an object by the rational mind. It can. Consider Searles Chinese room, if I recall correctly you knew Searles? or was it someone else?
You are sitting in a room with a book of rules for responding to various sequences of Chinese symbols. You don’t know Chinese. Searles then points out, in relation to artificial intelligence:
“I get small bunches of Chinese symbols passed to me (questions in Chinese), and I look up in a rule book (the program) what I am supposed to do. I perform certain operations on the symbols in accordance with the rules (that is, I carry out the steps in the program) and give back small bunches of symbols (answers to the questions) to those outside the room. I am the computer implementing a program for answering questions in Chinese, but all the same I do not understand a word of Chinese. And this is the point: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis, because no digital computer has anything I do not have.” John R. Searles, “Consciousness as a Biological Problem,” in John R. Searles, The Mystery of Consciousness, (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997), p.11
The difference between the bag of transistors and the bag of enzymes is that when I learned Chinese, I have the qualia, the internal experience of KNOWING Chinese. When I didn’t know Chinese, or when I am trying to learn a new subject in Chinese, I have to use the dictionary all the time. Knowing Chinese allows me to know the meaning of the sentence. It is the qualia, that science can’t explain. It is called the hard problem
“And this is our central quandary. Either we believe in a nonmaterial soul that lives outside the laws of physics, which amounts to a nonscientific belief in magic, or we reject that idea, in which case the eternally beckoning question “"'hat could ever make a mere physical pattern be me?” - the question that philosopher David Chalmers has seductively and successfully nicknamed “The Hard Problem” - seems just as far from having an answer today (or, for that matter, at any time in the future) as it was many centuries ago.” Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop, (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p.360-361
Given the pejorative used in his consensus view of the non-existence of the soul, and knowing that one doesn’t look for what one doesn’t believe exists, it is no surprise that Hofstadter calls the soul magic and decides in his book that the soul doesn’t exist. Materialism, after all IS the consensus view of both Christians and atheists today.
“Why do we experience consciousness at all? Nothing in any objective scientific theory of physics or information accounts for the subjective qualities of our otherwise empirically measurable experiences. In the integrated information theory proposed by Giullo Tononi, consciousness is what information feels like when it reaches a certain level of sophistication, But the fact of that feeling has no underpinning. That is the hard problem.” Guy Inchbald, New Scientist, July 13, 2019, p. 24
Calling consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain is not an explanation. It is like doctors calling my narrowed spinal column of a few weeks ago, a ‘stenosis’ which in Greek means narrow. lol. Epiphenomenon, like stenosis sounds so ‘scientific’ as if it is an explanation.
Searles writes:
“Even for a system of whose qualia I have near-perfect knowledge, myself for example, the problem of qualia is serious. It is this: How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences? How, to put it naively, does the brain get us over the hump from electrochemistry to feeling? That is the hard part of the mind-body problem that is left over after we see that consciousness must be caused by brain processes and is itself a feature of the brain.” John R. Searles, “Francis Crick, the Binding Problem, and the Hypothesis of Forty Hertz,” in John R. Searles, The Mystery of Consciousness, (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997), p. 28
Our consciousness is subjective, but science is objective. So I think it is a mistake to think the soul can’t be held up by the rational mind. Especially if one looks at quantum mechanics.
Physics is supposed to be out there, separate from human consciousness or the human observer. It is supposed to be objective and never involve the subjective. But quantum requires the subjective to be involved as the observer. The subjective observer says what happens in quantum experiments. I have used this before but as you re-read it ask how can the subjective observer determine what happened 2 billion years ago?
Theoretical physicist John Wheeler further elucidates the role of the observer with what are called “delayed-choice” thought experiments. (See Fig. 2.)
" Wheeler noted that it is possible to devise a double slit experiment at the cosmic level using light coming from quasars and a galaxy which operates as a gravitational lens on the way to Earth, bending the light inwardly as it passes by massive objects (as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity). This light would generate an interference pattern showing that light has travelled as waves. But if a measurement would be performed before the screen on which the interference pattern takes form, the pattern would dissolve and the photons would change from waves into particles. In other words, our choice on how to measure the light coming from a quasar influences the nature of the light emitted 10 billion years ago. According to Wheeler, this experiment would show that ‘retrocausal effects operate at the quantum level. " 13
The light’s passage by the massive light-bending galaxy occurred long before there were any people or multicellular life on earth. Yet our decision today determines what happened to that light 2 billion years ago. To paraphrase Weinberg and Wigner, “Human beings are in the cookie jar at the beginning of the laws of QM.” Matter is obeying consciousness. Matter, at its most fundamental level, is NOT master of consciousness; consciousness is master of the matter! The Migrant Mind: Quantum Soul
Steven Weinberg, a hard-core atheist, admitted that quantum can not be formulated in a way that avoids consciousness. I will take his and Wigner’s view as authoritative, although I too have gone through as many interpretations of quantum as I can find and in every one of them I know how consciousness becomes involved, even in those that claim to avoid the problem.
" Fundamentally, I have an ideal of what a physical theory should be. It should be something that doesn’t refer in any specific way to human beings. It should be something from which everything else–including anything you can say systematically about chemistry, or biology, or human affairs–can be derived. It shouldn’t have human beings at the beginning in the laws of nature. And yet, I don’t see any way of formulating quantum mechanics without an interpretative postulate that refers to what happens when people choose to measure one thing or another. " Steven Weinberg cited by Tim Folger, How Does the Quantum World Cross Over?, Scientific American, July 2018, p. 32
This has led me and others like Stephen M Barr and Euan Squires, to conclude that the soul is not subject to the laws of physics:
“A careful analysis of the logical structure of quantum theory suggests that for quantum theory to make sense it has to posit the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside of the description provided by physics.” Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 27-28
Elizabeth was eldest daughter of the “Winter-King” Frederick of Bohemia.
One problem, in particular, troubled her: she failed to comprehend in what way the thinking soul could possibly influence the body which was not thinking.
…
"Elizabeth’s problem remains as a basic difficulty with dualism. How can we understand the ‘connection’ between the mental substance and the physical body? It seems obvious that there has to be such a connection. In particular, it is surely reasonable to say that our conscious minds are affected by what happens in the physical world, i.e. by our sensual experiences.
…
"Returning to more reasonable ideas, we accept that the physical world has an effect upon the mental. Although it is perhaps hard to see how this might come about, it does not cause any major difficulties, essentially because we have no laws to describe the behaviour of the mental substance. However, it is natural to suppose that there is also an influence going the other way. We are conscious of the desire to do something and can translate that desire into the particular action. This again is how things appear to be. Thus the mental substance can affect the physical." Euan Squires Conscious Mind in the Physical World, (New York: Adam Hilger, 1990), p. 85-86
In this last, while we may not understand the connection, Squires answers Elizabeth’s problem. The mental thought that ‘I need milk’, can be translated by my mind into bodily action that drives me to the store in my car where I purchase milk.
But more than that, the human mind affects the behavior of quantum particles which are not inside the body, not necessarily near their body and it affects how the particles behaved in the past, not just in the here and now. What is the connection? I don’t know, but I know that the connection works both ways.
Speaking of the wavefunction of the universe in Quantum Cosmology (there is a wave function that describes everything in existence), Squires points out that it becomes clear that some observer totally external to the system must be considered, or, leave the measurement problem unsolved.
“…because of quantum correlations it is true to say that the only wavefunction that can be claimed to exist as part of physical reality, and not just an approximation, is the wavefunction that contains everything, i.e., the wavefunction of the universe.
"An immediate concern in quantum cosmology is that there can be no question of having an outside observer, external to the system, which can be described by classical physics and hence can provide at least a pseudo-solution to the measurement problem. By construction, there is now nothing outside the system being considered, so the measurement problem cannot be avoided. I am not aware of any attempts that have been made to apply the explicit collapse mechanisms to quantum cosmology,and although some interesting results have been obtained using the Bohm model, this is only just beginning to be taken seriously, hence most quantum cosmologists use a version of the many-worlds interpretation, even if without admitting this fact!” Euan Squires, The Mystery of the Quantum World, 2nd ed., (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1994), p. 142-143
Such a consciousness could only be God, or called a God, and he can’t be made of matter from our universe, so something non-physical must exist, be it a spiritual God or a spiritual soul. And thus, the rational mind can apprehend the existence if not the qualities of the soul.
One more item, I discussed this with a doctor I saw 2 weeks ago. there apparently is no site in the body which can be said to be the executive center of consciousness. we know where arousal takes place and we know what is active when we are aware, but no one site seems to be the control center, the ‘executive function’. She agreed that that was the case. We obviously have one or consciousness couldn’t exist. Does it exist outside our universe, outside the laws of physics?
