Wigner's Friend, the existence of the immaterial soul and death of materialism

Faith & Science Conversation
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Mitch wrote:

I doubt that the scientific community has any conclusion on free will and it certain not that everything is determined, quite the contrary. The failure of Bell’s inequality in experiments demonstrates that physical determinism is dead. The only way to keep determinism is to go outside the scientific worldview so those unwilling to do that accept the reality of an indeterministic universe.

Mitch, indeterminism is NOT the same as free will. That actually is a category mistake. From one of my favorite philosophers of the mind:

“As far as we know, the only established indeterminism in nature is quantum mechanics. But at the quantum level, the absence of causally sufficient conditions produces randomness, and randomness is not the same as free will. (Contrary to popular opinion, determinism is not the natural, or default, position in nature. Quantum indeterminacies are built into the structure of the universe from top to bottom, but tend to cancel themselves out at the macro level.”John Searle, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” New Scientist, Jan 13, 2007, p 48-49

The biggest problem with free will is philosophical – trying to understand how the idea even makes sense. If there are no causes for our actions then how is it any kind of will, and if there are causes for our actions they how are they free?

Maybe fruitflies can help (take two and go to bed. lol) We watch them fly, zig zagging around but their motions are NOT random. They are chaotic, which as you know is an entirely different thing mathematically:

“FRUIT flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, nonrandom - yet still unpredictable decision-making capacity. If evolution has furnished humans with a similar capacity, this could help resolve one of the longstanding puzzles of philosophy.
“Science assumes that effects have causes, and that if we understand the causes well enough we can predict the effects. But if so, our experience of being free to make choices is an illusion, since we are in effect just sophisticated robots responding to stimuli. If our behaviour is unpredictable, this is only because random events prevent us from responding perfectly to our environment.”
To test whether behaviour can be truly random, Bjorn Brembs, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, put fruit flies into a sensory deprivation chamber: a drum with a white interior that offers the flies no visual cues to orient themselves. The flies were glued to a torque meter that measured their zigs and zags as they attempted to fly.”
“Brembs and his colleagues analysed the resulting flight records using increasingly sophisticated models of random behaviour. Were the flies’ decisions random, like the result of a coin flip? No. Did they fit a coin-flip model in which the probability of ‘heads’ varied randomly? Again, no. Nor could they be explained by a series of random inputs, or a series of random inputs combined in non-random ways.
“Instead, the researchers found the flies’ behaviour bears the hallmark of chaos—a non-random process that is nevertheless unpredictable, like the weather.” Bob Holmes, “Humble Fruit Fly Makes Its Own Decisions,” New Scientist, May 19, 2007, p. 16

Mitch wrote:

“Since I am a libertarian incompatibilist, I naturally think there is a solution to the philosophical problem and although I do believe in existence beyond the physical, I still think the universe is largely indeterministic. Once again I take my philosophical prompts from Aristotle, and this time from his four causes, to suggest that we reject the scientific restriction of causality to efficient and material causes. Explained in terms modern parlance/thinking, Aristotle’s four causes are as following:
1. material - causes derived from a things composing materials in the reductionist view.
2. formal - causes derived from how the materials are put together in the holistic emergent view.
3. efficient - cause derived from pre-existing conditions in the time ordered view.
4. final - causes derived from something teleologically guiding things towards some end.
All of these find some support in various modern scientific understandings of things especially in quantum physics but the least popular of these is the last showing a general preference to stick to a time-ordered view of causality. And I think this also explains why free will is likewise puzzling and often disputed as illogical. I think that letting go of time-ordered restriction on causality is the key to making sense of free will.”

If I understand you correctly (and since we have disagreed about so much I want to be careful here), you are saying that Free will exists (libertarianism) and it is incompatible with determinism. And further Causality ought to be broader than science allows, that is allowing teleological causes. If so I would agree with you. when people ask me if there is purpose in life ( towards an end; teleology), I answer categorically yes. When I go to the store to buy bread, it is teleological causes that started the process. Yes, material and efficient causes are involved but I am acting towards a goal. I hold a view of evolution that is a random walk through the phase space of DNA arrangements which constrain the possible living forms and will inevitably result in mankind. Like making Sierpinski’s gasket on a computer. https://lodev.org/cgtutor/sierpinski.html Each running of the program creates a unique set of particle motions, but if you mark each location the particle lands on, it is deterministic that the gasket will appear. The particle is free to move in any order it wants, but the rules of motion produce the gasket. In some sense this is teleological. I wrote the code with the purpose of making the gasket.

It hinges on the following observation: When we make deliberative choices for stated reasons this does not mean that we are not aware of any reasons for making a different choice. Thus the fact is that we choose the apparent cause or reasons for our choice along with the choice itself. Thus it would appear that cause and effect originate in the same event rather than cause preceding effect.

Agreed. lol, until you show me this leads me to a reduction ad absurdam with my other views, then I have to think about it again. lol

Consider what makes a person a thief. We are likely to say both that a person is a thief because he steals AND that the person steals because he is a thief. Once again we see this confusion in the temporal ordering of our thinking when it comes to making choices. To put it simply the cause of our choices is not the pre-existing condition of what we were but the future condition of what we become by those choices. We are not responsible for what we do because of the pre-existing conditions but because of resultant condition of what we have made ourselves into.
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I agree here as well. The question is how do we get free will into a deterministic universe? In my view there is simply no way to get free will in the universe IF we maintain that consciousness is a material epiphenomenon of the brain. And I hate the word epiphenomenon–because it basically covers up our ignorance of how consciousness arises from the brain with a big fancy schmancy word.

Anyway, Schrodinger’s equation is deterministic and contains no mechanism for collapse. If consciousness is subject to the laws of physics, then it should go into the von Neumann chain and be in superposition with the quantum system. Classical physics is definitely deterministic, so, the only place I can even imagine free will entering the world is via the immaterial soul. SOMETHING has to be outside of nature for free will to exist. And materialists don’t want that, and will mock the idea like crazy.

Im enjoying this Mitch.

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Regarding your last passage, the choice isn´t merely between materialism and some kind of cartesian dualism. Mitchell, and he will correct me if I´m misrepresenting him, is arguing from an Aristotelian hylomorphistic view, which speaks of a union of body and soul. This is very different from the “embodied soul” of which christian physicalists are talking about, but also avoids the philosophical problems that most kinds of dualism are facing.

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Is this like Polkinghorne’s idea that mind and matter are two faces of the same thing? If so, then there is no observational support for it that I am aware of, and certainly more out of the view of mainstream view of science than what we have presented. That said, being in the mainstream means nothing as far as truth or falsehood of the idea is.

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I take neither view and would apply hylomorphism differently. Mine is a monistic view with two simultaneous effective dualities: mind and body, and physical and spiritual. Add in hylomorphism and that makes three effective dualities and a division of our being into eight different “parts”: The substance of the physical mind, the form of the spiritual body, the substance of the spiritual mind, the form of the physical body, the form of the physical mind, the substance of the spiritual body, the form of the spiritual mind, and the substance of the physical body. The point here is that I see no good reason for simplifying this by equating any of these things with each other.

… not that everything is so divided because the mind and body only applies to human beings… and I think the physical spiritual duality only applies to living things. However lets go over these effective dualities once more…

  1. form and substance of Aristotle’s hylomorphism is the most basic duality and the idea here is to enable explaining other effective dualities with a single substance in different forms much the way science explains everything in the physical universe as different forms of energy.
  2. physical and spiritual are thus explained as follows. Physical things are all part of a single mathematical space-time structure which includes all the laws of nature in the mathematical relationships incorporated into its geometry, and thus physical things are what they are because of these relationships. Spiritual things are not a part of this structure or any other structure but are what they are by their own nature alone. In a sense you could say that the physical universe as a whole is in this sense a spiritual thing in its own right.
  3. Mind and body are two interdependent but different living organisms, i.e. self-organizing processes in two different mediums each with their own reasons for doing things, their own needs, and their own system for passing on an inheritance to the next generation. I think the term “meme” coined for the mental equivalent of gene lends us a good language for describing this comparison between gene life and meme life.
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We agree on dualism.

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Well after a 4-day delay I’m going to reach back a bit, but it’s still immediately relevant. My argument is much less sophisticated than either Gbob’s or the hylomorphism, but I think that that just makes it all the more lethal to materialism. I am arguing for a classical dualism that involves the physical and the nonphysical. I’ll start here by responding to Pevarnick saying that although it could be a coherent belief that doesn’t contradict science, you can’t find any scientific evidence for it.

Pevarnik, I understand that the idea of an immaterial mind directing the immaterial wave function is not measurable. Sy Garte said something similar in that essay you referenced. So, on the one hand, it might look like an unmeasurable theory made from wishful reverse engineering.

On the other hand, there is one other huge, glaring, astronomically profound aspect to the whole discussion: to the extent that we know anything at all, we can know that the wave function in particular, and all of mathematics in general, is immaterial. And if math is immaterial, then so must we be. Let me bring in Mitch’s comment here—his comment in response to my statement, "How could the brain perceive things that are immaterial? Of course, it cannot”:

Mitch, I am not stating a point of view here, or an opinion. I’m stating a simple, undeniable fact. Now any disagreement is surely a matter of semantics, so just to clarify, I’m defining an immaterial phenomenon as something that cannot be directly or indirectly seen, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled. It has no light waves emanating from it or bouncing off of it, so there is nothing to see. It has no sound waves emanating from it or bouncing off of it, so there is nothing to hear. Etc., etc. If such phenomena existed, then the brain could not "know" it. And if we are observing the absence of physical qualities in something, then what are we observing the presence of?

So the current scientific establishment presupposes that immaterial phenomena are simply not possible. There are some vague, fringe exceptions, but by and large monism is assumed as beyond question. As Kenneth Miller put it in The Human Instinct, “Let’s assume the obvious, which is that human consciousness is a product of the workings of our nervous system as it interacts with the rest of the body and with the outside world.” (p. 150)

So in regard to something like mathematics, the materialist’s/monist’s options include:

  • To insist that absolutely everything simply has to have physical qualities—has to be composed of matter or energy or very tiny strings or quantum fields, etc. Thus, for example, Stephen Pinker says we can perceive the number 3 because "it has real properties that can be discovered and explored." “According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored.” (The Blank Slate, p. 192.) Since it is pure, incoherent nonsense to suggest that the #3 has physical qualities, Pinker hides it under a self-contradictory fog of Platonist philosophy.

  • To pretend that the (immaterial) mystery as explained by circular philosophy. Daniel Dennett is good at this: after acknowledging that all words (i.e. not just numbers) are immaterial, he says they are a type of meme, and then he later defines memes are "information things." He says some philosophers "bite the bullet" and conclude that words do not exist. But he can’t do that (after all, he is writing a book full of words) so he concludes by saying that, well, we just have to "include words in our ontology." (From Bacteria to Bach and Back). Would such an ontology be, in principle, any different from a soul—an abstraction to which we attribute the rational use of math and language?

  • To simply insist that we not ask the question–the question "What are numbers/words?". Somewhere above I quoted neuroscientist Dehaene making this argument. In short, his reason for insisting that we not ask the question was that it leads to a bunch of philosophical stuff. (It also leads to the evaporation of materialism!)

  • Now Pinker, Dehaene, Dennett and many others will also make a another, separate argument. They will say that our ability to perceive numbers and words in simply an instinctive ability simply “emerged” in ages past. (Miller uses the same “reasoning”, as illustrated in the title of his book, The Human Instinct.) But this is also a thoroughly self-contradictory answer. After all, instincts are, by definition, things that we do without thinking–i.e. things we do because we’re programmed to do them. But can you comprehend this sentence without thinking? No, you can’t. Can you determine the square root of 9 trillion without thinking? No, you can’t. Adding machines and calculators and computers can do such calculations in a millisecond, but they are no different from abaca. They don’t actually perceive the numbers. They aren’t thinking. They are tools that we use—we who actually perceive the numbers.

In short, no scientist can even articulate–much less test–a theory as to how our brains could perceive immaterial phenomena. So this argument is so simple and easy that it almost seems unfair: either theorize what the physical qualities of numbers could be (What texture or shape or force is there, for example, in the number 3?), or conclude that there is no way for our brains to perceive them.

And if our brains can’t perceive them? A soul by any other name— “a Platonic Form”, “a connectome processor”, “a qualia system”, “a meme machine”, “a global neuronal workspace”, “a superseded ontology”, etc.—will remain a mystery. As will our ability to perceive information.

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What he said.

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Good and interesting argument Matt. Did you see the quotes by Alastair Rae above? I posted them for you just after you left for 4 days.

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Yes, those are excellent Gbob. I also got your quotes from t’Hooft and Barr. I really think it’s just a matter of time before materialism is abandoned.

On the other hand, I can also see why materialism is so sacredly important to the naturalist. Even if they still get to keep evolutionary theory–which would be fine–it would radically change things. To say the least, it would limit evolution to nature and to the physical. There’s no way evolution could touch the presence of an immaterial mind. (Literally!) And this would of course also have profound implications on political issues, such as abortion.

So I can understand their zeal to protect it. Here’s a very candid quote about the matter from Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, in his intro to Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door

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Your argument suffers from the flaw of all logical arguments. People do not have to accept the premises upon which it is based. They can believe differently and they can not only articulate their beliefs but they can argue for them from premises of their own. Thus your argument proves and accomplishes exactly nothing. That is why we have thousands of philosophies and religions but only one science, because unlike these, scientists has a means to decide issues on which they disagree. They do an experimental test. And what if no such test exists to decide an issue? Well then that is not a matter for science and it goes back to philosophy and religion for their endless disagreements and debates.

That rules out numbers then since numbers can be directly and indirectly seen. In fact, I would like to hear what you do think falls into that category satisfying that definition.

Here for example is a 3. I can see it and you can see it. If you want to posit some thing represented by that number which cannot be seen then you can do so but I don’t have to believe in any such thing. So perhaps that is another option you can add to your list. It is called nominalism – the belief that there are no universals apart from particulars except perhaps those conceptual abstractions in our heads which are simply particulars of another kind. I am a nominalist and I certainly reject all that Gnostic Plato stuff. I believe in spiritual things but perhaps you would consider the spiritual things I believe to be “material” according to your premises and definitions rather than “immaterial,” since it looks like I don’t believe the things you call “immaterial” even exist.

So that would be a description of being directly seen. And how do we see the particles created in a particle accelerator? They are not directly seen. The charged particles are indirectly seen by the trails they leave in a cloud chamber. Other particles are seen only by even more indirect methods.

No, we do not. I am a monist not a dualist. Effective dualism is not dualism. It basically means monism can explain all the same phenomenon that look like dualism but isn’t. Take the mind and body, for example. Are these two completely different dimension of existence? No. They are simply two different living physical organisms like a rabbit and a bacterium. Would you describe a rabbit and a bacterium as two different dimensions of existence? Of course not!

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I have tried to find a paper on neuroscience that may be relevant but my files are large and I could not, so if my memory serves ……. the brain emits electromagnetic phenomena and it seems as if this, along with electrochemical events, are measurable when a human thinks. So ‘throwing this’ into the mix, could this be considered at a quntum level and thus should phycists design experiments that may include these measurements … just a question. :pensive:

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I would simply say that gsimons is correct. It is not really an issue of neuroscience but quantum physics and possibly chaotic dynamics.

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R[quote=“mitchellmckain, post:170, topic:40576”]
Here for example is a 3. I can see it and you can see it.
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What in the world does the number three look like?! Does it have size or shape or texture? No. Does it have color or smell or any such tangible thing? No. It is just an idea, a word. We can represent that word with symbols, with abacus beads, with apples, with bananas, with beats on a drum, with knots in a rope, with electric pulses in a calculator, with magnetic patterns on a flash drive, or with any other variety of media. This is not a “philosophical” statement, no matter how desperately materialists might want it to be philosophical. In other words, Philosophical labels are completely unnecessary for clarifying this simple, undeniable, non-negotiable fact: The number three has no physical qualities. You can mix such facts with a lot of philosophical labels, but you can also just look at the facts. The one and only “problem” with this fact is that it completely contradicts the presupposition of materialism. Hmmm, perhaps that presupposition is simply wrong.

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That is one heck of a quote from Lewontin. I never read that book. As much as I would like to agree with you that materialism will be abandoned, I don’t think it ever will be because of what Lewontin is saying–the alternative is to open questions that they think best left unasked. We are all sinners, none of us seek God, God seeks us.

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Ok, I stand corrected on what your view is. Now I know why you don’t like the immaterial soul. I guess I need to ask, do you think God is material or has an aspect that is material?

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This line of argument is not one I had considered before. Seems to me that only if one believes in the Platonic World can one possibly say 3 is an object, and believers in the platonic world are rather few and far between today because if you believe in something like that, one might be considered a bit weird. lol But then I know about being considered weird–it isn’t that bad.

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This is an intriguing idea. Perhaps someone else could comment on its feasibility; I can’t.

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Not according to mattconnally’s definition of “material” and “immaterial,” I don’t. As for God, I go with the Biblical view that God is spirit. And no I don’t think that means God is just a mental concept like the number 3. Paul says the resurrected Jesus was a spiritual body and no I don’t think that means the resurrected Jesus was just a mental concept like the number 3 either. As for our eternal existence, I think that too is spirit just like God and the resurrected Jesus and definitely not like what the Gnostics and pagan Plato was thinking either in their worship of the intellect.

I suppose you think that a person has to have a particular size, shape or color in order to be considered human. Maybe for you everything is about physical appearances but not for me. Each thing whether a 3, or a person, or a building, or a book is defined by different qualities and none of them are appearances which are the least important qualities a thing can have.

Yep, and there are also the conceptual abstractions in our heads for the number three. Doesn’t mean there is anything besides these particulars which you can worship as an “immaterial” idol.

The number three is not defined by physical qualities any more than lots of other things, but all kinds of them like the one here, 3, does have physical qualities so that people can see them.

Your philosophical premises are not facts. Opposing materialism doesn’t require one to be a Gnostic or a Platonist. One can be nominalist and still oppose materialism just fine.

Yep, that is correct. Your presuppositions can be wrong. And like I explained above there are no more materialists. But there are naturalists instead. I think your way of turning everything spiritual into nothing more than intellectual concepts like numbers is just playing into their hands, because they can demonstrate that science is better at dealing with intellectual concepts like numbers, better than religion has ever done so we don’t need such obsolete antiquated science any more.

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My background in philosophy is limited, but I am inclined to consider the number 3 as “conceptual” rather than “immaterial,” with both in a different category than “material.” Perhaps it would be reasonable to view conceptual ideas as a subcategory or the category immaterial.

What Glenn and I are calling the “quantum soul” is definitely in the category immaterial in the sense that it very definitely is not material, but that its manifestation, at least what we observe of it from quantum mechanics, is entangled with the material.

Related to our discussion of dualism: what I find intriguing is the use of the phrase “I am.” We find it used in the Bible, in the OT as a means of identifying God, and in the NT as a means of identifying Jesus. And then we have Descartes’ well-known self-declaration: “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”; “I doubt; therefore I think; therefore I am,” from which he develops his philosophy of dualism, partitioning reality into real but separate categories of immaterial and material. Finally, it should be noted that Genesis 1 tells us that God created man in His image. Since God is Spirit, I take that to mean that the “I am” is providing mankind with a spiritual nature. There is too much here for my mind to unpack, but quite enough to make me ponder in amazement.

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Of course there are–especially when it comes to talking about consciousness and the mind. The scientific establishment fervently, passionately presupposes that we must be our brains, in line with Lewontin’s statement above or Miller’s statement above, or Crick’s statement here:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3.)

Or here’s the psychologist Gazzaniga quoting Williams James:

The point which as evolutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new forms of being that make their appearance are really nothing more than results of the redistribution of the original and unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the “evolution” of the brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. In this story no new natures, no factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage. (The Consciousness Instinct, p. 7)

Materialism is sacred and absolutely non-negotiable for the Naturalist. Now you keep speculating about my motives or objectives or apologetics strategy. But if we set all that aside and simply look at the non-philosophical facts, I’m simply saying that their precious presupposition is flat out wrong. It requires an unending supply of relentlessly esoteric philosophical blabber in order to try to explain away all the (immaterial) mysteries.

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