…and this is a 
Your brain is the next battleground
Category: Creationism
Posted on: October 23, 2008 4:28 PM, by PZ Myers
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
Sound familiar? That's exactly the same rhetoric the Discovery Institute has used towards evolution, and it's just as false. It's to be expected, since this is the ranting of a DI fellow.
What Schwartz is arguing for is dualism: the idea that the mind is not the product of the activity of the brain, but is somehow generated supernaturally, with the brain being nothing but the host or receiver for the emanations of an immaterial 'soul'. Contrary to his claims, however, this is definitely not a popular view in the neuroscientific community — if anything, the trend is going far, far away from what he claims, with the evidence growing that the reductionist, materialist approach to the brain is the best way to understand how it works. It's not breaking down. Just as evolutionary theory has been strengthened by advances in molecular biology, so too has the materialist view of the mind been strengthened by multidisciplinary approaches in neuroscience.
The article is reporting on a meeting of these DI-sponsored loons, and it really does sound like a delightful coterie of idiots. Denyse O'Leary was there, along with Mario Beauregard, who together authored what I consider the worst book of 2007, The Spiritual Brain, and so far I've read nothing as bad in 2008, so they may deserve a lifetime award. It's a book that was practically unreadable in its incoherent style, and which was full of illogical claims built from fallacious premises and bad experiments. Schwartz provides more excellent examples of the nonsense these guys are propagating.
To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.
From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.
That makes no sense. The perception of mental activity is associated with detectable changes in the activity of the brain; that is not evidence for dualism. Would it be evidence for the idea that the mind is the product of the brain if our most sensitive instruments revealed that while people composed sonnets or solved calculus problems or daydreamed about Tina Fey nude, their brains were as inert as large lumps of cold silly putty? I think not. These data are exactly what we'd expect if thought were the product of brain activity, that we'd see brain activity while people were thinking. We even have experimental evidence of correlated brain activity preceding individual awareness of conscious thought…again, as we materialists would expect.
The article points out that this is a looming concern, and it's one I've been talking about for a long time. Just as evolution challenged religious literalists preconceptions about human exceptionalism and our origins, and made itself a focus of concerted hatred by the dogmatists, neuroscience is the next big science that is going to antagonize them, since it challenges other fundamental concepts of primitive religious thought, such as the idea that we have immortal souls separate from our flesh, that we are imbued by our creator with this magical element at some instant, such as conception. Remember that this is the papal escape clause: Catholics can accept physical evolution, but that the significant spiritual event was the endowment of a soul on the human lineage at some indefinite time in the past. It's also going to be a flashpoint for the anti-choice crowd, who want to claim personhood and identity on clumps of cells that don't even have any neural tissue — it yanks the basis for their claims right out from under their feet.
The only thing sparing us right now is that most public school science classrooms never introduce anything about neuroscience, so it avoids the problem so far of actually directly antagonizing ignorant yahoos who don't like their children liberated from the biases of their parents' ignorance. Give it a few more years, though, and let it become a bit more high profile, and it will trigger furious outrage in many more. After all, it is so degrading to be told that your finest thoughts are made from well-ordered meat.
Comments
Posted by: terry | October 23, 2008 4:36 PM
mmmmm, well-ordered meat.....
Posted by: Glen Davidson | October 23, 2008 4:39 PM
It's what they've "founded" ID on from the beginning, this belief that the mind is magic. Berlinski included, as he disagreed with me in the pages of Commentary that the mind/brain simply has to follow the laws of thermodynamics.
No physical mind, no evolution, it's really as simple as that. How the hell would an immaterial mind arise from the rules governing evolution, after all?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Tulse | October 23, 2008 4:41 PM
I do happen to think there's are pretty serious philosophical problems in trying to explain how physical stuff produces mental stuff, but a) I'm damned sure is does, and b) I'm also damned sure that postulating a sky fairy doesn't provide a solution.
(And I'll see Schwartz' study and raise him one, as I did a PET neuroimaging study looking at changes in the brain under different mood states -- people weren't even thinking, just feeling, but produced observable changes in the neural activity. Is that supposed to be surprising?)
Posted by: Nentuaby | October 23, 2008 4:42 PM
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
-- They're Made out of Meat, Terry Bisson
Posted by: Dirty Hairy | October 23, 2008 4:45 PM
...
So...brain activity that is recorded during thought processes...is evidence of this "dualism"?
Just what the f**k are these people smoking?
Kids, Just Say No.
Posted by: Hap | October 23, 2008 4:46 PM
This would be the time when a basic general understanding of science would be helpful. Don't you have to be able to distinguish between a "yes" and "no" answer to a question for it to even make sense in science? How would one test for the presence of a soul? Does Occam's Razor ring a bell with these people?
I'll just file this under "evil people using bad logic to keep power they can't possibly get another way (well, other than if they were really successful at gathering deposits into their coffee cans or accordian cases or by writing an eloquent cardboard sign)".
Posted by: bunnycatch3r | October 23, 2008 4:49 PM
I wish the Discovery Institute success in this pursuit. Having a soul would be very cool.
Posted by: Speaker to Third Graders | October 23, 2008 4:50 PM
@2 Netuaby
Damn! You beat me to it!
I love that story!
Posted by: DuckPhup | October 23, 2008 4:52 PM
There's an actual word for that, isn't there? Oh, yeah... MAGIC.
I wonder why he just doesn't say that?
Posted by: Darth Wader | October 23, 2008 4:53 PM
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down"
Sure looks that way to the ones not looking I guess.
Posted by: Lago | October 23, 2008 4:53 PM
If you have never seen Jeffrey Schwartz before, you are in for a real treat. He is a special type of bat shit crazy that makes you wonder where are the people with the nets when you need them. He not only has a position supported by pure wishful thinking, he has the demeanor of a meth-addict who thinks you stole his next fix. Eyes a glaring, and lip a quivering, he is RIGHT GOD DAMN IT!! HE IS RIGHT...HE IS RIGHT!! WAHAHAHAHA...TAKE ME SERIOUSLY....... PLEEEEASE!!!!
Posted by: CrypticLife | October 23, 2008 4:53 PM
They'll just deny it. It will take centuries before the churches admit any of it's true.
They might kill a few neuroscientists, though, just to make the denial easier.
Posted by: Gene | October 23, 2008 4:53 PM
Tina Fey nude...
Mmmm....
Posted by: Brownian, OM | October 23, 2008 4:54 PM
Not enough, for sure.
I've always thought that those who are so enthralled by dualism that they accept any personal experience of theirs as somehow reflective of reality simply haven't dropped enough acid or 'shrooms.
Three hours spent discussing phylogeny with a giant talking carrot named Lou should be enough to cure anyone of mind/brain dualism.
Posted by: Speaker to Third Graders | October 23, 2008 4:54 PM
Sorry, not @2, @4. Its been a long day.
Posted by: CrypticLife | October 23, 2008 4:57 PM
how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down.
These kinds of statements always make me giggle a bit.
Posted by: Lago | October 23, 2008 4:58 PM
"Tina Fey nude...
Mmmm...."
I will see your Tina Fey Nude, and raise you a Tina Fey, naked, with her back arched while wearing high heels...
Posted by: Rey Fox | October 23, 2008 4:59 PM
How very egnorant of them.
Posted by: Donnie B. | October 23, 2008 5:03 PM
There exists a class of computer programs known as self-modifying -- they can overwrite some of their instructions with other instructions, thus modifying their own behavior when those sections of code are later executed.Does this prove that there must exist a non-material computer mind that is separate and distinct from the program's instructions? By Schwartz's logic, it does.
Apparently there really is a ghost in the machine.
Posted by: Kobra | October 23, 2008 5:03 PM
These psychotic sycophants sure are persistent.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | October 23, 2008 5:04 PM
What Brownian said. Which is pretty much the same thing that I said,
underover a previous nym, back in 2006. (That li'l search bar at the upper left is a powerful item!)Posted by: Brad D | October 23, 2008 5:06 PM
You know this is really easy to debunk even for people with little scientific knowledge, just look at the case of Phineas Gage or many other people that have suffered brain injuries and survived. Change your brain = change your mind.
Besides, how do they think drugs affect the mind if they don't affect the brain? Demons??? Well... yeah, that is probably what they think.
Posted by: ThirdMonkey | October 23, 2008 5:09 PM
Wow. It looks like there might be a market for my (tongue-in-cheek) theory of everything: That the universe is just a very complex MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) and we are the avitars of players that exist outside of the universe. In other words, Life is just a game.
It would really appeal to people who are sick of classical religions but can't cope with the idea of being nothing more then thinking meat.
Yup. Time to start me a religion. Anybody care to but a dollar in the box?
Posted by: Clemens | October 23, 2008 5:09 PM
So because the mind can alter brain activity, it's not part of the brain.
Okay, so since I am able to punch myself in the face, my fist is not part of my body because it can alter my body.
On a more serious note, regarding brain/mind I take the following view:
In the end, all though processes, emotions and what we in everyday language call personality and soul, comes down to biochemical processes and cell activity, so it really is "just" material.
On this micro-level, however, the complexity is so big that you cannot "really" use this to explain every kind of human behaviour and experience, just in the way you cannot use plain quantum physics in a practical way to describe macroscopic phenomena. In the same way physicists need statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to deal with these issues and thus introduce macroscopic quantities such as temperature or pressure, to treat the mind/brain we must introduce abstract, macroscopic quantities like emotions.
Posted by: Lago | October 23, 2008 5:10 PM
Jeff never seems to grasp the idea that the brain is not one thing, but a huge community of interacting elements, many with priorities of their own that are in conflict with other elements.
To look at it in overly simplistic terms, one aspect of the brain looks at a girl half naked on the beach and says, me want!...Me want now!!
However, the self preservation part of the brain also has a say, and reminds you that you ain't going to tag that and live as long as your girlfriend is standing next to you, and the girl in questions boyfriend is able to bench press a Hummer.
The fact that you can over-ride a desire like this seems to be sheer magic to Mister Schwartz, while many of us can reason out much simpler explanations.
Posted by: Abbie | October 23, 2008 5:11 PM
I would recommend Godel, Escher, Bach for a very interesting take on this... it goes into some logic stuff that went over my head but for the most part it convinced me that dualism doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Posted by: Eamon Knight | October 23, 2008 5:16 PM
I like how they just can't resist invoking their favorite whipping boy, Darwin, even when the connection is tenuous. Even if the brain got here by purely physical evolution, one can always postulate that God imbues it with a magical "soul" (something that IIUC some churches explicitly teach). But the IDiots have always been rather vague on which bits of biology are magical, and which they can cede to plain old evolution.
Posted by: Katharine | October 23, 2008 5:18 PM
/Dualists/. I hate these assholes.
I heavily suggest, for all of you who want some information about these idiots, familiarizing yourself with their arguments so you can formulate adequate counterarguments. Some very silly dualists are:
Jaegwon Kim
David Chalmers
Richard Chappell (this guy HATES me)
Rene Descartes (the first formal dualist)
You will notice most of them are philosophers. Very few neuroscientists are dualists, and I don't know anybody at my university, which is one of the leading institutions in neuroscience in the United States, who espouses such ridiculous ideas.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 5:20 PM
Am I the only one who worries that pro-science Catholics, and others who employ the "ensoulment" escape clause, will turn out to be fair-weather friends when the full impact of neuroscience hits home?
Any field of inquiry can become a challenge to doctrinaire religious belief, depending on the particular doctrines being espoused; however, unlike cosmology or archaeology, neuroscience has direct medical and technological relevance to daily life. It's so much easier to get steamed up about an idea when that idea strikes close to home. I suspect a good many invocations of creationist claims like "the bacterial flagellum couldn't evolve" are secondary fluff, byproducts of the real, heartfelt assertion: "I didn't come from no monkey."
The number of ways we can treat the brain and modify the mind will only increase as we discover more about the meat which thinks. Strap yourselves in — it gets bumpy from here.
Posted by: Christian | October 23, 2008 5:21 PM
I know that stuff is a catch-all term but in this case, mental "stuff" isn't stuff at all (as the physical stuff) but actually configuration of stuff.
In other words, it's all patterns in motion and this is the reason why postulating some ominous substance doesn't help at all when trying to explain the mind.
Even if this substance exists, it must be able to assume (at least two) different states and it's proponents should be able to explain why a mind can only be instantiated in this substance and not in ordinary matter and why it can't even be emulated by ordinary matter.
Above all, if the brain is only a transceiver, then there's a lot of information flowing back and forth all the time which means that the interaction of this mind-substance with that blob of organic matter between our ears must be enormous. Heck, it must be several orders of magnitude larger than the interaction of neutrinos with ordinary atoms and yet, we can detect the latter but somehow we can't do so with the former.
Posted by: Brian D | October 23, 2008 5:23 PM
I work in a behaviour-based robotics lab. If that viewpoint proves to be accurate, then the mind not only doesn't exist as traditionally thought, but rather is nothing more than an illusion. It's sort of neo-behaviourist this way. (I'm personally skeptical, but it'd be interesting to see how far we can go with this.)
PZ, have you ever heard of Vehicles by Valentino Braitenberg? It's an extremely short book about what he calls 'synthetic psychology' -- building models that, through environmental interaction, produce behaviour akin to cognitive agents, and then analyzing the models (as we can't directly analyze the mind, having an analyzable model is preferable when building theories, as it essentially gets around the psychology-as-pseudoscience argument my physicist colleagues joke about). The book's readable in an hour, and by the end of it you feel like you could build a thinking agent in your basement. (It's not just thought experiments, though -- the second half is a layman introduction to the biological basis of every move he made.)
I mention Vehicles here because it raises an interesting philosophical point. Braitenberg describes the machines using anthropomorphic terms (things like "attraction", "hatred", "fear" and so on) which start out seeming impossibly implausible. By the end, a reader accepts them and can see where they came from. And yet, there's no clear line to where this transition (from 'not mindlike' to 'mindlike') takes place.
In short, it shows how a mind could emerge through purely natural processes (there's even a chapter devoted to a vehicular version of evolution by natural selection), and couples this with biological examples of each and every process that inspired the machines. People who subscribe to dualism will probably have their worldview sufficiently shaken by reading it, and since it isn't a commonly-known book or filed under 'biology', they're more likely to start reading it than, say, Origin of Species.
Posted by: BobC | October 23, 2008 5:26 PM
The Discovery Institute, a Christian creationist organization, is calling magic "non-materialist causation". "Non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality" means "Magic needs to be understood as part of natural reality".
This is more evidence for the idea that Christians are the most stupid people in human history.
Posted by: gazza | October 23, 2008 5:30 PM
Conciousness (which these fundies are claiming is basically spiritual) is a fascinating area. It's an area where we have to say that for science it's work in progress. Why does the distributed computing in our brain give us the impression of a 'core mind' in a single place apparently observing out. It's questions like this that it's fun to investigate.
I've read a couple of popular books by Susan Blackmore on this (in the UK - don't know if around in the US) and they are really interesting - make you doubt everything you might have thought about the subject. And I believe the book by Dennet is worth reading too - haven't done that yet.
Posted by: Scott from Oregon | October 23, 2008 5:31 PM
I've always argued that nueroscience will be the nail in the religious coffin.
I've got a novel in the works using the simple idea that you can't leave your body and be sentient, because you can't take your brain with you...
The brain projects the mind which creates the idea of "I". Without the projector functioning, there is no "I" to transmigrate, leaving the notions of religion dead in the water...
Or err... something like that...
Posted by: Kel | October 23, 2008 5:32 PM
I was talking online to a guy last night who, after seeing that previous article about understanding when you die, posed the question "what if the mind isn't material?" Yes what if? What if aliens had really built the pyramids? What if the holocaust is a Zionist conspiracy? What if the sun really does orbit the earth? Just because we don't have absolute certainty on an issue, it doesn't mean that any alternative is an equally valid concept. Given that if we injure the brain we lose certain mental function it would suggest that brain function is entirely a material process. It's not a monoist assumption, it's a deduction from decades spent analysing the brain.
Arguing from personal incredulity is hardly a convincing argument. Just more "spiritual" nutters wanting validation of their beliefs... though the guy I was talking with is not a creationist but a "new age" nutter, and he was really against creationists attaching themselves to non-material neuroscience. Funny that
Posted by: patrickhenry | October 23, 2008 5:32 PM
Ha! I beat PZ and blogged about this one yesterday. One very neat item was in the article:
Posted by: Katharine | October 23, 2008 5:37 PM
SfO, are you familiar with the zombie argument?
It sucks a lot, doesn't it?
Posted by: ShadowWalkyr | October 23, 2008 5:39 PM
I've always thought of the brain as "hardware" and the mind as "software." This has always seemed a reasonable interpretation.
In light of this post, is this a faulty analogy?
Posted by: Raynfala | October 23, 2008 5:39 PM
@23:
You mean I might just be some pan-dimensional entity's gold-mining 'bot? Oooof, now there's a disturbing thought...
Posted by: Katharine | October 23, 2008 5:40 PM
If anyone wants to see some SPECTACULARLY TERRIBLE bullshit, find Chalmers's idea of qualia.
The man obviously forgot that thoughts are actions, not things, and nor is he familiar with basic perception and psychophysics.
Posted by: Brian English | October 23, 2008 5:41 PM
Brownian:
Three hours spent discussing phylogeny with a giant talking carrot named Lou should be enough to cure anyone of mind/brain dualism. Give the man another order of Molly. That's pure comedy gold and insightful (I think) to boot!
I've always wondered why religious types didn't attack physics as much as biology. If the law of conservation of energy is worthy of law status, then souls, should they exist, can't interact with material brains anyway. So God's existence still won't get you to heaven, as there is no you (soul) that can be rewarded for the actions of you (brain). Yet that never seems to bother them. This article is in a similar vein. I guess this attack on neuroscience means they are slowly going after other sciences that threaten the belief in sky daddy and forever after....Lookout physics (just say it's quantum indeterminacy that creates the gap that allows the soul in.)
Posted by: Katharine | October 23, 2008 5:42 PM
ShadowWalkyr, the brain is basically both hardware and software. Look at Developing Intelligence for information about the brain-computer analogy.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 5:43 PM
ShadowWalkyr:
Most of the people who would tell you that's a bad analogy have, in my experience, been using absurdly limited definitions of what "software" is. (See, for example, this discussion from a couple months ago.) So, I'd say that your analogy is basically fine.
Posted by: Brian English | October 23, 2008 5:44 PM
I've always thought of the brain as "hardware" and the mind as "software." This has always seemed a reasonable interpretation.
In light of this post, is this a faulty analogy?
With my limited understanding of this field I'd say the hardware is the neurons (supported by glial cells, NGF and whatever), the software is the everchanging connections between neurons and brain areas (like self-altering code or virus) and the program we see as it is executing is the mind.
Posted by: Azdak | October 23, 2008 5:46 PM
Is there an equivalent of the Salem Hypothesis for clinicians in the fields of psychology or psychiatry? When I was in school, I was frequently appalled/amazed/astounded by the sort of nonsense the clinicians would buy into -- "sure, the research says that, but my anecdotal evidence contradicts that, so the research is wrong!"
I eagerly await the joint Discovery Institute/Jenny McCarthy announcement that you can simultaneously cure autism and page Jebus by wiggling your pineal gland.
Posted by: Brian English | October 23, 2008 5:46 PM
I mention physics and immediately Blake Stacey appears. More than coincidence?
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 5:51 PM
Actually, it's more a sign that I've been concerned about non-materialist neuroscience as "the next creationism" for a while now, so I'm likely to spend time hanging out in threads like these. Also, it means it's not quite time to log off and head across town for gin-and-tonic night with friends, but that'll be soon enough.
Posted by: Brian English | October 23, 2008 5:54 PM
So you're not superhuman or supernatural then? Well, that's another hypothesis to discard.
By the way, I enjoyed reading your post on not understanding science without maths. No wonder I don't understand science that well. :)
Posted by: CJO | October 23, 2008 6:00 PM
with the brain being nothing but the host or receiver for the emanations of an immaterial 'soul'.
Just up front, this analogy is so stupid (and I know it's PZ's paraphrase, but it's not a straw-man. I have seen the argument made).
The human brain, with its trillions of synapses, is easily the most complex, densely interconnected three-pound chunk of matter in the known universe.
And it's an antenna. Uh huh, sure buddy, whatev.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:01 PM
Thank you. I'm fairly pleased with that post and the responses it has received. In fact, with this motivation, I've seriously been trying to find the time to write a math book.
Posted by: Brad D | October 23, 2008 6:02 PM
Jynnan Tonnyx... Drinking those will alter your brain chemistry a bit :)
Posted by: Brian English | October 23, 2008 6:07 PM
Yes, that's the one, the necessity of mathematics. I'd forgotten the title. Good stuff.
I've tried staring threateningly at Roger Penrose's Road to Reality in a so far vein attempt at getting that book to reveal its knowledge to me. I think that that tome perceives that my glances are empty and I won't attack it. It appears I will have to brush up on maths to understand it....
Posted by: Vironian | October 23, 2008 6:08 PM
As someone in neuroscience I found comment #24 a really nice analogy to this brain-mind issue. Brain is the "stuff". Mind is a concept, just like temperature. The macroscopic level comes about by something that occurs on the microscopic level - which, in turn, is too narrow for some other usages of that concept.
Posted by: ennui | October 23, 2008 6:11 PM
My homunculus had a comment, but then his homunculus didn't agree, and her homunculus was at the Cartesian Theatre buying tickets to tonight's show.
Turtles.
Posted by: ThridMonkey | October 23, 2008 6:12 PM
The analogy that I've always liked (and has been brought up in the time it took me to write this) is that the mind is like the software running on a computer. Does it have any real tangible form? Not any more then software does. Software only exists as a pattern of 1s and 0s, on-off states of switches, the orientation of magnetic fields on a hard disk, or as electrical signals moving down a wire. Same with the mind. It is nothing more than the pattern of signals traveling through neurons. In both cases software/computer and mind/brain either is useless without the other. So you can say that "Yes" the mind does exist, but it only exists within the context of the brain. Destroy the brain and you destroy the mind and without the mind the brain is dead.
I can definitely understand how "duelists" could perceive the mind "soul" as being separate. I can also understand their desire for the pattern that is the mind to transcend the death of the brain. However, whatever magical process allows for this has absolutely no evidence and is definitely a matter of religion until, of course, the mind-digitization scanner is invented.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | October 23, 2008 6:12 PM
Have we gotten this far into an anti-dualism thread without anybody mentioning that the inimitable Carl Zimmer has written a book on the science-history of the idea?
I'm a bit ashamed to admit I haven't read it, but all his other stuff is pure win.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:12 PM
I've not read Penrose's book myself, but I've heard it criticized for trying to do too much in too small a space: "You can't expect people to learn integrals from scratch in only five pages!" or the like. I've always thought the Feynman Lectures on Physics did an admirable job of introducing the mathematics they need as they go along, so you might try Volume 1 of those books, as well.
Posted by: helioprogenus | October 23, 2008 6:13 PM
It's funny how a lump of gelatinous neural tissue evolutionarily selected for by our environmental constraints allows some hairless apes to discard rational thought and embrace the kind of childhood fantasy reserved for credulous 5 years old. It wouldn't be so bad if they were wasting their intellectual abilities in isolation, but their eagerness and need for corrupting minds that may one day potentially benefit mankind is irresponsible and inexcusable. It's easy to justify anything with the phrase "I believe it to be so", but much harder to say "although I may imagine a belief to be justified, ultimately, empirical evidence supersedes any belief that can easily be faulty based on certain factors that allow our minds to maintain credulous notions".
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:14 PM
Zimmer's Soul Made Flesh is very good. (My copy is autographed — ha!)
Posted by: Ichthyic | October 23, 2008 6:15 PM
no time to check to see how many others noticed that last line:
non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
IOW, non-naturalistic explanations need to be understood as part of naturalistic explanations.
*smacks head*
the doublethink, it hurts!
Posted by: Patricia | October 23, 2008 6:18 PM
Hey Blake somebody is praising your book over on Free Thought Radio.
Posted by: Ichthyic | October 23, 2008 6:19 PM
How very egnorant of them.
exactly what I was thinking.
Posted by: Chris Noble | October 23, 2008 6:20 PM
In the latest ground-breaking experiments on the mind-body connection researchers have been able to demonstrate "mindful walking" where subjects have been able to modify their ambulatory status using only thought processes.
Scientists are baffled by these results which are inconsistent with standard materialistic science!
Future experiments are planned to test whether subjects can simultaneously perform "mindful walking" and "mindful gum chewing".
Posted by: ThirdMonkey | October 23, 2008 6:24 PM
Raynfala #39 -
Do you ever find yourself giving money to strangers for no apparent reason? Like panhandlers or churches? Then maybe you are a gold farmer and your pan-dimensional player is getting some sort of compensation on the outside.
That's it! Tithing to a church is like gold farming. Every time you tithe your player gets a BJ (or the pan-dimensional equivalent)! So come on everyone! Make your player happy and put a dollar in the box!
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:29 PM
???
Posted by: Cuttlefish, OM | October 23, 2008 6:32 PM
At the center of this issue is a three-pound mass of tissue
That can contemplate infinity, or love, or space and time!
In addition to these features, this mass sits in social creatures
That communicate these contemplations (sometimes, yes, in rhyme).
Just how consciousness emerges from sensations, acts, and urges
Is a complicated question, yes, but hopeless? Not a bit!
But what doesn't help the matter is this silly dualist chatter--
See, it doesn't count as science if you merely make up shit.
Posted by: dsmccoy | October 23, 2008 6:32 PM
I've always thought of the brain as "hardware" and the mind as "software." This has always seemed a reasonable interpretation.
In light of this post, is this a faulty analogy?
It's not too bad, just a little weak these days.
Neuroplasticity means that the "hardware" is constantly rewiring itself based on what the "software" is doing,
So there's more than just the two levels.
The fixed structure, the plastic structure and the dynamic activity.
Posted by: Patricia | October 23, 2008 6:36 PM
Didn't you write a book about stuff falling out of the sky?
Posted by: Anon | October 23, 2008 6:37 PM
"Death from above" would be Phil Plait's book, if that is what you are thinking of.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:38 PM
Um, that I know of, I haven't written a book that's been published yet.
Posted by: Oded | October 23, 2008 6:40 PM
@Tulse #3
I do happen to think there's are pretty serious philosophical problems in trying to explain how physical stuff produces mental stuff
It's actually pretty simple - I think the best analogy to it is like a file on your hard drive.
You cannot physically point to any specific thing in your brain and say "that's a thought!", in the same way that you cannot point to any specific thing on you hard drive and say "that's my pr0n stash!"
A "thought" is an extremely high abstraction of the entire complex of physical things going on in your brain, put into the context of your brain. You cannot have the "single neurons of the thought" without the rest of the brain, because the brain puts it all into context, and gives that specific arrangement of neurons and electricity meaning - a thought for you.
Posted by: Kougaro | October 23, 2008 6:44 PM
And if i may add to #67, it's more like the hardware and software are together in the brain : to push the analogy, it would something like a GPU, or other specialized chip, where "software" operation is in fact directly cabled through the hardware.
Also, i would like to point out that as those loons will try to deny that we don't have an immortal soul, the same loons will try to deny the results that may arise from the study of other animals, primates and other mammals especially, with the same old argument : we are "special".
Posted by: Patricia | October 23, 2008 6:44 PM
Oh shit. Confused again, I really must start drinking earlier in the day.
Yes, that's the one. There you go, proof of the goddess of confusion. ;o)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 23, 2008 6:45 PM
Being confused with Phil Plait is one of the better things to happen to me this week. ;-)
Posted by: onclepsycho | October 23, 2008 6:49 PM
What is the evidence this gang of imbeciles put forward? Near-death experiences. That's the thing they're putting their money on, and big money. It's called the AWARE project, it involves 15 hospitals, and instead of doing potentially really interesting stuff, they plan to hide boards with signs that can only be seen from a "disembodied" perspective. Largest parapsychological experiment ever done, as far as I know. I'm not surprised at all that they're linked to the ID tribe: the core manifesto of these neo-dualists is a huge book entitled "Irreducible Mind". Mmmh, irreducible, it sort of rings a bell...
Posted by: Andy James | October 23, 2008 6:51 PM
Like I said on RDnet:
Make no mistake, this is not about the truth or morality or principles. Its about power and money, and religious leaders vie for both. They will say and do anything to attain it, because they loose nothing if they are unsuccessful. If they are successful, we loose the tradition of 200 years of honest scientific achievement, and perhaps the emergence of a new dark age of mankind.
They must be countered everywhere they speak.
Posted by: craig | October 23, 2008 6:53 PM
I think of it more like this. The brain is the hardware and the software... the "mind" is the output. Same way mario jumping on a toadstool isn't the software, it's the output (or result) of the software (and hardware).
Posted by: Glen Davidson | October 23, 2008 6:53 PM
Or in other words, he deliberately introduced a set of causes that would activate an internal causal chain to, get this, produce different effects than another causal chain would have done.
Very good, he managed to use causality to do the obvious, change what was happening in brains in a fairly predictable manner. It's magic!
I'm beginning research soon to demonstrate that computers can be set up to follow chains of instructions as well, and thus to prove that computers are magic.
See, all you have to do is to change the rules of dualism so that material causes do affect mind in predictable ways, and then when causality is shown once again to dominate the classical realm, you just claim that it's evidence of dualism.
Sort of like using ID to "predict" the well-known complexity of life. Natural systems are almost always complex, while intelligence is not known to (at this time) be able to handle that much microscopic complexity, therefore "irreducible complexity" would on its own tend to suggest (though this is not by itself diagnostic of evolution) that "natural processes" caused the complexity. But hey, if you can fool enough people into gawping at complexity and ignoring the identifiable evidence, you have a public relations project, if not a scientific one.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: SASnSA | October 23, 2008 6:53 PM
I haven't seen that level of denial since Baghdad Bob (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf) claimed "There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad, at all"Posted by: Marcus Ranum | October 23, 2008 6:58 PM
since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material.
By that logic, my computer has a soul? It must suffer, running Windows all day...
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | October 23, 2008 7:00 PM
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
OK, wiseass. With all that meat, why do we still have McDonald's???
Posted by: Sastra | October 23, 2008 7:06 PM
"... non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
The other term for "non-materialist causation" is "supernatural causation." What distinguishes those things clustered together under the term supernatural is top-down mind control. Souls, God, ghosts, ESP, PK, chi energy, magic -- they're all examples of the primary place and power of mind, life, and its products, working from 'above' to influence low material stuff.
So what Schwartz appears to be doing here is a very common spiritual ploy (though I usually get it from the New Age side rather than the Traditional Religion side) -- deny that you believe in the supernatural. No, the supernatural is silly. You wouldn't believe in that. How could something outside of nature influence nature? That's unsophisticated.
Instead, consciousness is a special NATURAL force. God exists, but it's NATURAL. Natural = good. Schwartz's phrase here is another way of saying nature is supernatural.
Scott from Oregon #34 wrote:
So have I and, I'm guessing, a lot of the science-oriented atheis