I Think, Therefore I Am Chemicals

Creation-Evolution Headlines ^ | 10/03/03 | Creation-Evolution Headlines

[bondserv]

I Think, Therefore I Am Chemicals   10/03/2003
The Darwinian Revolution was part of a drive to naturalize biology; that is, to explain biology, including the origin of species, strictly in terms of natural law and chance, without divine intervention.¹ Much rode on the coattails of that effort: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary sociology, evolutionary ecology, and evolutionary politics.  Perhaps the crux of the debate is the human mind.  Is there a naturalistic causal chain leading from hydrogen to the mind?  Are all of our deepest emotions, dreams, aspirations, values, logical arguments, thought processes, preferences, assumptions, intuitions, hopes, plans, core values, and sincerely held beliefs traceable to the chemical reactions in our neurons, plus nothing?
    Thomas Metzinger thinks so, and his book Being No One is given favorable press by Franz Mechsner (Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research) and Albert Newen (Philosophy Department, University of Bonn) in the Oct. 3 issue of Science.²  Their book review, entitled “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” states the issue beginning with Descartes’ foundational premise:

When the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes made his famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” he was certain that this intuition could not possibly be doubted.  If there are thoughts, there must be someone who thinks.  Descartes identified the thinker with “himself,” and himself with the immortal soul.  Unsatisfied with the Cartesian framework, scientists try to explain human self-consciousness as a natural phenomenon.  This “naturalization project” is guided by the complex question: How may conscious selfhood (subjective experience and autonomous agency) emerge from causal chains of events in a physical world?  In Being No One, the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this challenge and proposes a framework of how self-consciousness might be naturalized.  In a bold, thorough, and thought-provoking synthesis, he combines a huge body of neuroscientific and psychological research data with philosophical considerations and fine-grained phenomenological reflections on real-life experiences.
    Metzinger, a professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, maintains that there are actually no autonomous selves in the material world.  The perception that one is the source of thoughts and actions is an illusion, emerging from physical processes in neuronal networks where no self can be identified.  To put it provocatively, there are experiences, but no one who experiences; there are thoughts, but no thinker; actions, but no actor. Based on this premise, naturalization of self-consciousness means explaining the detailed representational, functional, and computational structure of the selfhood illusion.  One must consider its evolutionary advantage, how it emerges from neuronal processes, and how it is related to the puzzling philosophical riddles in connection with consciousness, such as the mind-body problem.

The reviewers delve briefly into Metzinger’s framework, and discuss one of his most important observational supports: the mental patients with “Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients experience themselves as being nonexistent, obviously contradicting Descartes’s claim that the mere presence of thoughts leads to the conviction of existence.”
    They believe Metzinger has hit on a successful trail toward naturalism of the soul:

The theory of subjectivity Metzinger presents in Being No One seems very promising in that it offers a conceptual framework for explaining many empirical phenomena related to human self-consciousness.  His basic strategy is to show that everything of interest regarding self-consciousness can be reduced to phenomenal representations.  Under the presupposition that phenomenal representations emerge from neuronal processes, this means that naturalization of self-consciousness is indeed possible.  Metzinger’s interdisciplinary approach opens a new path toward a scientific theory of consciousness and self-consciousness.

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¹For a recent discussion of the naturalization project, see Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God (Brazos Press, 2002) and the sequel, Darwin’s Proof (Brazos Press, 2003).
²“Neuroscience: Thoughts Without a Thinker,” a review by F. Mechsner and A. Newen of Being No One by Thomas Metzinger, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2003), 713 pp. ISBN 0-262-13417-9, in Science Magazine, Volume 302, Number 5642, Issue of 3 Oct 2003, p. 61.

A conceptual framework is not a fact, and a strategy is not a truth.  Neither of these three evolutionists has established anything close to the wide-sweeping conclusion they claim.  On what empirical evidence do they make such bold philosophical judgments?  Some mental patients claim they have no self.  How do we know they are not good actors, and the psychologists are just suckers for what they are being told by the patients?  Have they ruled out all other possibilities?  And if minds don’t exist, how can they apply their minds to get into the mind of someone else and know anything?  They just shot themselves in the foot with the self-referential fallacy: if thoughts are illusions emerging from chemicals, they have no ultimate validity; therefore the claim that thoughts are illusions from chemicals is invalid.
    They also committed the either-or fallacy about the “mind-body problem.”  To say there is either all mind or all body is a false dichotomy.  Both are real.  The mind can harm the body, and the body the mind.  There are complex interrelationships between the two that we cannot fully understand.  That does not mean that one or the other is an illusion, or that one has to explain everything about the other in its own terms.
    Notice how, again, they trot out the favorite evolutionary miracle word “emergence” and flash it over the place.  Who needs scientific causality when uncanny entities like thoughts can just emerge from non-thoughts, when selves can emerge from non-selves, when acts can emerge without actors, when souls can emerge from neural synapses, when pneuma can emerge from sarx?
    Notice their hunger and thirst for mammon.  The desire to naturalize all of reality is clearly shown to be a passion, not a science.  Early science was motivated by desire to seek the mind of God; post-Darwin science is motivated by a desire to undermine all mind.  It is a reductionist mission, promoted with all the zeal of an evangelist, to expunge the I term, information, from all equations, and leave only T (time), E (energy), and M (matter).  It is a project filled with presuppositions, assumptions, beliefs, axioms, philosophical puzzles, and doctrines.  It is not science.  It is religion.
    They talk about illusion.  Who is being deceived here?  They are deluded into thinking they have arrived at a coherent, naturalistic system.  For to believe that mind, self, and consciousness are ultimately definable in toto by matter in motion, they must endow T + M + E with all the attributes traditionally ascribed to deity: omniscience, omnipotence, wisdom, and autonomous self-existence.  This is not naturalism: it is pantheism.  Science Magazine offers no platform for a rational alternative or rebuttal; it has become the pulpit for the most radical of the philosophical materialists, and the pseudo-scientific mouthpiece of the Church of Pantheism.  (Notice also that this is the only religion permitted in the science classroom, and is defended against all engagements by zealots of the NCSE, ACLU, PAW, and Big Science.  This is to ensure that young impressionable minds, which are mere illusions, will not be disturbed as the Doctrine of Emergence is inculcated into them, with the thought, which is a mere illusion, that there might be alternatives.)
    Theistic evolutionists should take note.  This review makes abundantly clear that Metzinger-type evolutionists have no room for you.  They will not stand for any personal Deity, no matter how remote from the operations of nature.  There is no soul in their theology.  And if there is no soul, there is no relationship, there is no Logos, there is no communication, and there is no salvation.  Ye are dead in your sins, and of all evolutionists most miserable.  Understand your plight, and choose you this day whom you will serve.
    Pastors should take note.  Believers of all stripes should take note.  Thinkers should take note.  Human beings who have hearts thumping in their chests should take note.  This book review should amplify the red alarm, in case you haven’t already heard it blaring since 1859.  Darwinism, predicated on the religious belief it is possible to naturalize all of reality, seeks to usurp all other belief systems.  It instigates the worst totalitarianism in history, for its core beliefs deny the existence of free will itself.  Its laws lead to the end of reason, the destruction of the soul, and the dissolution of self-consciousness into a frothing sea of illusions.  It is none other than the abolition of man.

Their hope is dashed on nothing less
Than nature's blood and randomness.
They dare not trust Descartes' frame,
but wholly lean on Darwin's claim.
No solid rock in Darwinland,
All logic ground is sinking sand,
All reasoning is thinking bland.

[bondserv]

Stop trying to think about it!

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[bondserv]

PingO!

If you would like on or off of this ping list, Freepmail me.

[HangThemHigh]

I think, therefore I yam.

Cogito ergo spud.

[fqued]

subtle but fascinating argument:

If our minds and rationality are a result of time & chance (the athiestic evolutionist view),

then that says absolutely nothing about the truth of my thoughts, only that they are a result of chance and time.

One cannot get to the truth of any thought, only that it might have an evolutionary advantage. Evolutionary advantage is not the same as truth.

Therefore, the view that our minds & rationality are a result of chance and time can only be said to have an evolutionary advantage, and not that it is true.

It is a self-stultifying statement.

[RLK]

I'm too simple a man to understand such discussions.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[Tamzee]

My sister and I spent about 5 hours the other night debating exactly this issue LOL

I can't agree that it is all chemical and time... I knew an educated, very sane and grounded gent that died in a car accident and floated above the scene while EMS dragged his body out of the car and then revived him. He was able to recall perfectly how many EMT's were there, what they did to get him out of the car, many of the activities that were performed on him while still with no heartbeat and eyes closed.. and he saw it all from above. A very classical out-of-body death experience... simple brain chemicals can't account for awareness and recall of events from a perspective outside the body.

Just my opinion... but I'll stick with it until I hear something that explains the discrepancy ;-)

[bondserv]

LOL. Wise man.

[bondserv]

Experience and common sense tell us as much. Thanks for the post.

[First Amendment]

I think I want "on" your ping list!

(I'll have to read Lewis' Abolition of Man)

[Tamzee]

Most welcome for my small part in relaying his experience. Thank you for posting the discussion :-)

[First Amendment]

I'm too simple a man to understand such discussions.

One meaning of "simple" is non-devious. It is good to be non-devious.

These over-educated fools who posit dogdoo like the above are so clever they make themselves sick (and anyone they sucker into following them.) Their nonsense is easy to dismiss. WHO is seeing the thoughts? WHO is thinking the thoughts? A thought MUST have an observer, a witness. If they REALLY believed they didn't exist, they might as well starve to death; in fact, they are being hypocrites if they don't. (Especially since these types of clever fools also believe there are too many of non-existent people.)

[fqued]

Actually, I am a Christian both practically and philosphically. I like apolgetics, and have long been fascinated by self-stultifying arguments. A few examples:

All truth is relative. Well, if all truth is relative, then the statement all truth is relative is itself relative which imples that some truth may not be relative.

I can't express myself with words. But you just did.

I also like certain views that are practically (in practice) self-stultifying, such as:

solipsism. NOONE lives or can live as if solipsism were true. Thereone one can deny it's truth because of its fundamental non-livability.

But that might be a bit much at bedtime.

[fqued]

Actually, there is another subtle argument that takes that idea a step further as an evidence of the existence of God.

[First Amendment]

Supposedly these wise(a**es) think they don't exist, but I bet they'd protest if someone who DOES think he exists tries to take away their money or car. If they don't exist, why would they mind?
They are:
A. Hypocrites
B. Fools
and last but not least:
C. Scam artists (Supposedly they think they don't exist, but they want money, power and adoration. If they lived their beliefs, they would just as well wander off and live in a cave, never speaking or writing again.)

[Consort]

The quantum version: I am because I think I am.

[First Amendment]

Actually, there is another subtle argument that takes that idea a step further as an evidence of the existence of God.

That's the next step. First acknowledge that we really do exist. The next logical question is, where did we come from and what is our purpose here?

These fiends who want to confuse the sheeple with false arguments that no one exists are really just trying to deny the existence of God.

[Tamzee]

Never too late for stimulating conversation... ahhh, but I forgot... never say never ;-)

[explodingspleen]

Physical law, "deterministic" or not (some like to assert that laws given in terms of probabilities are not deterministic) can never produce self-awareness.

You can create an arbitrarily intelligent entity (with respect to memory and ability to perform computations), but this all necessarily takes the form of 'if-then' statements. For example, 'if hungry then eat'. F = GMm'/r^2 is an analogous, more complex formulation: if F is Q, then G is Q * r^2 / Mm'. The premise of any system of study of the universe is that its behavior fundamentally comes down to finitely many such stipulations.

It should be obvious, however, that no matter how many 'if-then statements' you nest, you will never, ever, produce a self-aware being. There is no critical level of complexity at which you will attain self-awareness.

From the standpoint of science, this is irrelevant. A universe with sentient entities is indisguishable from one with entities that are merely intelligent.

Metaphysics, however, entitles a self-described sentient entity to be suspect that there is something at work external to natural law which is reponsible for his/her awareness of self.

Not that anyone in the academia would ever bother to waste their time with a deterministic philosophy of *reason*...