Egnor’s at it again, trying to support his idea of dualism. His latest example is much less insane than his last one, so this won’t be as entertaining. There’s actually a serious question imbedded in it.
He’s using an analogy with a cell phone (personally, I think he’d have made much more sense if he’d just gone straight to his explanatory metaphor for the brain; the comparison of the mind with a cell phone has too many distracting details that don’t fit.) What he is proposing is that, rather than being a local generator of the mind, all that elaborate stuff in the circuitry of the brain is part of a receiver — there is a soul somewhere that is transmitting the essential elements of the mind to be expressed in the activity of the brain. So what we have is a soul-transmitter (S-T) somewhere with a two-way channel for signals to and from a brain-receiver (B-R).
Here’s the deal: I can’t disprove that! No one can. It has the advantage to the dualist of claiming the existence of an undemonstrated property of an organ that isn’t completely understood, so it’s a kind of soul-in-the-gaps hypothesis. It’s a strategy any creationists should find comfortable.
What I can do is chip away at the idea a bit. It has implications that don’t really disqualify it, but do mean it isn’t going to be too satisfying to religious people, although philosophers probably won’t gag too much over it. It also has properties that make it a thoroughly unscientific explanation. Here are a few facts that imply some weird attributes of the S-T.
Stimulation of regions of the brain can evoke specific memories and sensations; there is a physical mapping of higher-level properties of the mind in the brain. Now one could argue that that’s what the S-T does; like the neuroscientist with his electrodes, the S-T is playing on recorded responses in the brain. This does have the problem for the dualist that it downloads huge amounts of our perceptions and experience into meat, making a S-T less necessary.
Brain injury can lead to loss of specific subsets of functionality of the mind. Damage can cause, for instance, changes in personality, loss of memory, serious perceptual changes, and loss of motor control. These are observations of many thousands of lesions, all with different effects—we can confidently say that the brain doesn’t have one function, as a receiver, it has many, and that there are many local properties of exceptional complexity that Egnor is ignoring. Again, it also says that if the brain is a receiver, it’s a very peculiar one, where reception of particular aspects of the S-T signal are localized. Loss of memory, for instance, would imply that the S-T lacks an independent store of recollections, and relies on what you’ve got tucked away in meat.
The way our minds work is subject to physical phenomena. Why should our minds get tired if it’s our bodies that have been working hard or staying up late? Why do hormones affect our mood — giving us lust or anger or euphoria — if our minds are projected from a remote location? It implies that a lot of what we consider subjectively to be part of the human experience are local phenomena, independent of the essential “I”.
Egnor’s analogy distinguishes between the externally generated signal (the voice on the phone) and locally generated noise (pops, clicks, hisses, etc.) but where it fails is in recognizing that that, even within his soul-transmitter/brain-receiver model, a lot of the locally generated phenomena are essential parts of what we consider to be us. This is not a reassuring picture of souls and life-after-death — it would have to be an afterlife in which we’re stripped of our memories and our personalities and our sensations. That isn’t an objection in principle, of course; it’s only a recognition that Egnor’s idea has implications he’s ignoring.
What makes his idea unscientific?
It’s not at all parsimonious. Here we have this immensely complicated organ, the brain, and we have these immensely complicated phenomena — consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, etc. — associated with it, and Egnor is saying that it’s only a false correlation. He’s deferring all of the causal mechanisms to some completely independent source having unspecified properties, but which is presumably as complicated if not more so than the brain. That’s not operationally useful. You can’t do science with that scheme.
Most importantly, there’s no evidence for any of it! Notice that we must have 1) an element of the brain that is a receiver—that instigates patterned activity without any kind of natural input. It could be there somewhere in all of the tangled mess, but it has not been shown. We must have 2) a signal of some sort from the S-T to the B-R. Nothing has been proposed about the nature of this mysterious process, nothing has been demonstrated about it, and in the absence of a description of its character, nothing can be tested. Conveniently, there is no way to isolate the receiver from the signal, either. And 3) we need an instance of a S-T. This is pure fantasy at this point.
His justifications for this so far demonstrate essentially no real depth to his thinking and a lack of logic. There’s his previous argument that for mind to be a product of the brain, there must be a physical and spatial mapping, which is probably the silliest rationalization I’ve ever heard on this subject. Now he’s claiming that because voices have meaning, and “The only thing that can cause meaning is a person,” then matter cannot generate meaning — a nice tautology that simply pretends the materialist claim that people are made of matter doesn’t exist.
Right now, we have mapped a lot of functionality to the physical organization of the brain. It’s fair to say we are far from having figured it all out, but if someone wants to propose an explanation, whether it’s as earthly as the effects of inhibitors of transmitter degradation on mood or the existence of a cranial antenna to pick up droplets of ectoplasm from the etheric plane, we expect evidence, and proposals to test the idea. The materialists have them. The dualists don’t. It really is that simple.
Blake has more on Egnor’s strange little cell phone analogy.
Thank the FSM we have Egnor. Without him we’d just have no idea what the “arguments” for dualism might be. After all, it’s a topic that’s been strangely neglected by philosophers lo these many millenia.
If i was a theologian i’d tell people the exact opposite of what Egnor says. I’d tell them that our brain writes data about us on to the soul, so that after our brains die the soul can continue to exist retaining our personalities and memories.
Of course that’s complete nonsense that i came up with on the spot but i’m sure there’s a number of theists who could be duped into agreeing.
So, here we have a man who has made a life study of brains and how they work, saying that artificial intelligence could not possibly work because its inventors could not hook it to a soul? That such a thing would be by definition demonic if it did work because it would be animated by evil spirits? OK, that sounds pretty farfetched but I had Southern Baptist friends in college who refused to read Asimov because they believed that machines that could pass the Turing test were possessed.
In Egnor’s previous revelation on EvoNews he wrote:
There you go. Egnor accepts the reality of immaterial causes, which sounds very weird to me. How can immaterial causes be real? Anyway, he goes on to leap the obvious gap with the grace of SuperEgnor to land on the ice floe of Free Will.
As a chemist I fail to understand how Egnor cannot be awed by the marvelous chemical computer he carries around in his pointed, little head. Perhaps Egnor is a quart low of norepinephrine.
So considering that functions and activities in the human brain map fairly consistently onto the same functions and the same activities in the same locations in animal brains (in animals where the particular location/function exists, of course); does this mean that all life forms with central nervous systems are just receiving instructions from an external source? Or do other animals just happen to have brains that look pretty much the same and actually do the things that the same regions of our brains don’t do but rather receive from an external transmitter?
Which is probably why he uses an analogy with mind rather than brains, I suppose… he can just pretend that everything non-mind-based is local while arguing that mind is a nonlocal phenomenon. Which would be wonderful if he could make a useful distinction between the two; and if he can, I’ve got a Nobel Prize for him.
Okay, PZ, how do you do it? How do you write a blog while keeping your day job? I have trouble reading your blog while keeping my day job. You make me tired.
Just wondering.
Non-human animals have brains. Are they soul receivers as well? So all dogs go to heaven? As littel as he’s making an argument for anything, he’s making no argumen whatever for an orthodox reading of Christianity.
It’s brilliant!! I would recommend he publish this in whatever peer reviewed jurnal brain researchers publish in.
Great post! I like reading your debunking of creationist nonsense.
On the other hand, this:
Well, if I were a creationist, I’d quotemine the shit out of that. Of course they would, those lousy buggers.
If the brain isn’t a receiver, then why do tinfoil hats keep out government/alien mind-control waves? Answer that, smart guy.
I suppose the simple answers (if the first is a bit cliched) are that it’s not even wrong, and it’s a mighty complicated antenna that the Designer had to use. Hell, Descartes’ antenna was the pituitary gland, which by mere “common sense” seems a bit more reasonable.
And Socrates at least admitted that the soul was weighed down by the schmutz and matter of the body. I mean that was at least a notion that dealt with some of the issues (like the soul getting tired, or suffering in sickness), even if it had little or no use or explanation for that glob of wet matter stuck in the head. It’s altogether too pathetic for a brain surgeon to have a less advanced notion of the connection between mind and body than Plato did.
Of course this all leaves a gap in the laws of thermodynamics as well, that either body affects “mind” by losing and gaining energy to and from the beyond (so at least the “laws” don’t hold in our universe in the ordinary classical sense), or affecting “soul” without any kind of “force” or energy acting upon it. Well, I guess if you don’t believe in evolution with evolutionary causation, you might as well throw out any other physics that is useless or harmful to your theology.
And gee, I wonder why the soul is beholden to the limitations of the body, so that illusions are seen and misunderstood, that is, misunderstood prior to education. I mean, what’s this soul doing if it’s not compensating for the limitations of body?
Naturally, any other meaningless concept could be conjured up, like magic atoms that act differently in brains than in the test tube, and such a concept would be as compatible with/useless in science as Egnor’s little soul belief. Or gee, what about Greek gods and European demons providing a substantial amount of mental activity? Maybe the body is the seat of consciousness, and the brain is simply connected to it and the workhorse for this body-consciousness.
I wonder how the soul picks through the brain to be conscious primarily of the information encoded in the nerves? Why isn’t it conscious of all of the metabolic activity existing in the brain (for instance, so that it could evaluate the mistakes sometimes made by brain)?
The good old ID answer is, that’s just how it is, and shut up with the questions, you damned materialist.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
I hope Egnor credited the original source for this view: William James.
PZ, isn’t there a case somewhere of a person who was born with only a brain stem, yet lived a normal (to an extent, I suppose) life? Exactly how much of this brain receiver is necessary for the soul to shine through? And why don’t animals have this as well? What makes animal minds so different that they don’t pick up the same signals? Or do animals have souls?
If I move my Brain-Receiver two inches to the left of the table, is that a good place to pick up the Altruism Channel from the Soul Transmitter?
I haven’t completely thought this through, which seems appropriate for a refutation of Egnor, but if meaning can only come from people (“Try new Soylent Meaning. It comes from people!”) and not matter, then why does my brain sort and filter information so that I only receive it selectively? For example, when I detect movement out of the periphery of my field of vision late at night, who ascribes ‘potential threat’ meaning to that information and causes the fear response? Is it my soul or my brain which ascribes ‘irritating noise’ meaning to a wailing baby?
I’d like to see Egnor try to sell this crap to Dennett. Dennett would lobotomise his soul.
then either you, or they, don’t understand why something that is not disprovable is a horridly weak argument.
If they decided to jump on that, it would simply further weaken the idea that anything on their side has anything remotely to do with science, which would be entirely counter to the function of the Disco Inst.
but then, it’s not like they don’t shoot themselves in the face on a regular basis anyway, so statistically speaking, you’re probably correct that they will quote this.
I couldn’t resist dissecting his “thought experiment” a little bit. I also did a little digging into his general logic problems.
I was going to use the misperception of illusions as a further example in my post above, but I see Glen Davidson beat me to it.
Illusions are another example of the material brain (not the mind) ascribing meaning to a signal or information, in this case incorrectly.
Doesn’t Egnor see that his “Soul of the Gaps” is heading the same way as the “God of the Gaps”? There is no room for a ghost in this machine.
Oh, I forgot… it’s already been revaled that Egnor is a full-blown cynic, just trying to cash in on the gullible. I bet no-one at the DI knows as many difficult words as he does.
Years ago I was interviewing for a consulting job with a major trading firm. An hour of the interview was with their mathematical guru, a Ph.D. and former professor at a conservative Christian college, whose very sophisticated options pricing models had made hundreds of millions of dollars for the firm. After I’d talked about neural nets and genetic algorithms and stuff like that, he made precisely that suggestion about the brain being some sort of receiver for information generated elsewhere and transmitted by ‘vibrations’ that are undetectable by normal instrumentation. What could one say? I said, “Yeah, I suppose so, but if so, we’d never know it.” I learned later (I got the job) that he was dead serious. It ain’t only neurosurgeons that come unzipped.
I might also ask why it is that the soul seems to be so preoccupied by evolutionarily-adaptive thoughts. Why, at puberty (you know, when reproduction becomes possible) does the soul end up with much stronger sexual urges, strategies to end up in bed with attractive partners, and a constellation of behaviors that appeal (well, do in the right package) to the opposite sex?
Note that this is not wholesale agreement with evolutionary psychology, which I have no problems with in theory, but do in many of its claims up to this time.
What I am pointing to are general reproductively adaptive and save-your-own-skin behaviors, like running from bears (however rare it is that we do so, we’re certainly adapted to effect avoidance strategies of big-toothed and large animals), not dating the girl “with the great personality”, looking for health in potential sex partners, and, when properly educated and socialized, staying away from life-sapping religions.
I mean gee, why not let the bear eat our useless brains, and go on up to heaven where everything is so much better, and where nothing-at-all can be so exciting and so much fun (Talking Heads, for those so unprivileged as not to hear their best album)? Instead we have “sinful” dispositions that war against the supposed better nature of the soul (the Bible, especially Paul, says so), and this “sinful nature of the body” oddly rules the brain in ways that evolution predicts of a brain adapted for bodily preservation and reproduction.
Just another in a long line of coincidences that IDists have to believe in. But you know, it is we who believe in “accident,” not them, for all of these coincidences can be chalked up to inscrutability, and to the injunction against predicting anything from the claims made about soul and the magical mystery tour of ID evolution/creationism.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Egnor can prove duality. All he has to do is conduct research on a soul. How much it weighs, what it’s composed of, how the soul and body interact, where the soul goes when the body dies, etc. With the budget of the discovery institute and modern technology this should be incredibly easy.
Another thing to think about: Simulated neural networks are used everyday for doing tasks once thought to require conscious brains, tasks like like speech recognition. Are those simulated neural networks soul recievers too?
How is it that a simulation of an artificial neural network inspired by the brains physical properties just happens to behave in brain-like ways, yet clearly, since it is purely a software, “just” a computer program, it cannot in any way be a soul reciever?
IBM’s Blue Gene project, or some follow on project should eventually put this the-brain-might-be-like-a-radio nonsense to rest once and for all.
Egnor’s arguments sound pretty bad, but you’ve now posted a rebuttal of his initial argument and now a response to his followup. So it looks like you’re having a back and forth discussion-wouldn’t a link be in order, so we can read what you’re responding to? It seems like you’re trying to half-ignore someone.
Wait, didn’t Egnor say that the reason altruism doesn’t reside in the brain is because material and non-material entities can’t interact? Well, if our soul-transmitter is transmitting things like altruism, then clearly by Egnor’s own logic, the brain can’t act as a receiver for them, so he’s no better off than his previous bad explanation.
Good point, Justin. I didn’t even notice that there was no link, since there’s usually so little in their little screeds that we couldn’t rattle off in our sleep.
I think that this is the link.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
One piece of negative evidence would be identical twins. It stand to reason that they would have the same mind, since they effectively have copies of the same receiver.
I would think this would be an obvious hole in the ‘brain as a receiver’ concept.
Two posts on dualism and souls but noone even used the word incarnum. What has happened to nerdcore?
Wikinite: In Douglas Hofstadter’s latest book on consciousness, he makes the case that identical twins sometimes do share the same mind.
He also claims that it’s simply wrong to map one ‘mind’ to one brain. In reality- our ‘minds’ are slightly diffuse over many people’s brains.
For sure- each of our brains is fairly neatly divided into a left and right hemisphere- yet we perceive both acting together as one mind.
There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog’s breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written ‘Stardust,’ let alone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
-Kurt Vonnegut, who is now up in heaven
half-egnore, that would be.
(sorry, it was too tempting)
Okay, PZ, how do you do it? How do you write a blog while keeping your day job?
I think either PZ has cloned himself or deep in his basement there is a weird aquarium of mutated cephalopod teleprompters who blog incessantly at PZ’s command.
Stupid people must be on a congested network or possible the original AT&T network.
Christian:
So this Hofstadter has evidence that identical twin’s share the same mind? Because that’s what a case is, a set of evidence that supports a positiion. What is this evidence?
If the brain is just a sophisticated soul-cellphone, why does the cosmic supreme designer keep designing bigger ones, while human designers are able to make theirs smaller and smaller? Why are we stuck with this damn 1980s model?
Egnore proposes this: “Imagine scientists living on an isolated island who have developed sophisticated science and culture, with one exception: they deny that telecommunication is possible.”
That starting suggestion is completely incoherent in itself! If you _have_ sophisticated science then you must have got to grips with electromagnetism and with electronics.
“If the brain is just a sophisticated soul-cellphone”
Or a soulphone perhaps?
If that were the case, wouldn’t they ask everyone to turn theirs off at the start of church?
Not that it’s not already implied….
There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog’s breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written ‘Stardust,’ let alone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
-Kurt Vonnegut, who is now up in heaven
Uh huh, like computers will never be able to able to beat a chess grand master. Of course Vonnegut desperately wanted to believe this, he was an artist after all. Stating these things so cocksure absolutely however is really the hallmark of an emotional need to believe overriding reason. A small sampling of links:
Computer Generated Music Composition (an MIT thesis)
Algorithms for Musical Composition
Lots of other links:
AI topics: music
Wikinite, Hofstadter is using a thought experiment to make his case. I haven’t listened to this, but it’s an interview with him on personal identity: link.
He is a philosopher of metaphysics & mind. He wrote I am a Strange Loop which discusses his view on mind in more depth (it’s on my reading list–right I’m reading “The Mind’s I” compiled by him and Daniel Dennett).
I think that interdisciplinary discussion is essential in hashing out topics in mind, but they’re really tricky. We speak very different languages.
I’m not sure being appointed President of the United States really falls under “a normal life.”
“Perhaps Egnor is a quart low of norepinephrine. ”
His thinking is so strange – so concrete, so unable to grasp the idea of an abstract concept, that one does begin to think that maybe he started with pretty strange genetic wiring. I have heard that taking things literally that are not meant to be, and being very religious is indicative of some neurological state, but I cannot find out what.
“He also claims that it’s simply wrong to map one ‘mind’ to one brain. In reality- our ‘minds’ are slightly diffuse over many people’s brains.” Speak for your own, mine stays right here.
“Okay, PZ, how do you do it? How do you write a blog while keeping your day job?” He is the only man with a 40-hour day.
“If that were the case, wouldn’t they ask everyone to turn theirs off at the start of church?” I would have thought hanging up your brains before you went into a church was mandatory.
I wonder how they could find out all of that without learning what the antenna did. Actually, I wonder how the damn thing manages to put out sound so far from the celltowers. You’d think the guy could at least come up with a phone that operates via satellite, so that his scenario could even work.
But that’s said, let’s suppose that it is a satellite phone and they go into a cave, behind (“behind” depending on where the satellite is, of course) the trees, or under a canopy of metal leftover from WWII. And the voices quit, then begin again when in the right orientations and positions. Holy Designer, would anybody really deny that some information was somehow traveling from somewhere? They might think that it was the gods or the like, but the only legitimate conclusion would be that somehow the info is getting into the phone from a source “up there” somewhere. They might even think that some invisible waves or streams of matter were providing the information.
But Egnor comes across an MP3 player, and for the duration of the batteries’ lives, he’s sure that he tapped into some God’s voice, and becomes a prophet dictating what the people should do. That’s the ID analogy, for the MP3 player is relatively immune to blockages of its output (yes, water, for one, would, but it would not be implausible to anyone that water disturbed the innards), and there is no evidence of a signal coming in, yet Egnor is pretty sure that God is talking to him.
Now we change the scenario: The MP3 player drops and then intermittently works as you shake it and move it about. There has never been an indication of any signal getting to it, but hey, Egnor’s convinced that nonetheless it was his breaking taboo (dropping the sacred object) that severs the connection between God and himself through the player.
So OK Egnor, which one seems more like the human brain, the one that can be shielded from input, or the one that operates about the same in caves, under metal canopies, and behind trees (aside from mood and perceptual effects)?
Well hey, the brain is the MP3 player, or more closely analogous, it’s the computer from the plane that no longer has any connections with the outside world.
And that’s too bad, because it seems as though these souls which are connecting through our “antenna brains” would indeed be able to reach out and touch someone quite apart from the body, and so we’d have telepathy at the least. Not that there’s anything impossible about physical systems being able to transmit one from another (cell phones, &tc), however with “minds” it is in fact relatively easy to show that they communicate via bodily responses and perceptions, with no detectable telepathic abilities.
Good little parable there, Egnor, as it establishes that the mind is more analogous to an unconnected computer than to a machine whose communications can be interrupted by various means.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Good ol’ DI. We get bad philosophy from brain surgeons, bad biology from philosophers and mathematicians, and bad math from biochemists. Stay tuned for an article by Casey Luskin on do-it-yourself brain surgery.
And why is there a correlation between brain and body size?
And so on.
And why is there a correlation between brain and body size?
And so on.
“If that were the case, wouldn’t they ask everyone to turn theirs off at the start of church?”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of aviation accidents turned out to be due to souls intefering with the electronics.
Okay, let me give this a try…
That’s actually an interesting quote from Vonnegut. But why, after applying himself to formulate his thoughts in prose, did he need to rest his tired brain? (Like everybody else.) Why do people become better at whatever they are concentrating on with time and practice, whether it’s writing, or music, or whatever? Does the soul need to recuperate? Do its abilities grow with time and use? If so, then in what way is it different than any other material, physical system?
I understand that Egnor is saying that the soul is sitting in the captain’s chair, and is ‘directing’ the brain to do its bidding, and that the brain gets tired because it’s only physical, but in what way is learning to write a symphony correctly, (in harmony with good feelings), different than learning to walk in harmony with gravity? Or any of the number of other ways in which we–and all animals–learn to piece together the puzzles in life?
It’s deeply ironic when people conclude that our ability to grasp concepts, in ways that no other animal seems to be able to do, means that there must be a supernatural deity involved.
Vonnegut demonstrates, very well, how people quite often just throw up their hands and say, “I don’t understand it and I’m tired of thinking about it so I’m just going to conclude whatever makes me feel good.” Lack of real investigation is the hallmark of the religious mentality.
Actually, in my opinion Egnor’s argument is just as nonsensical as his previous ones. First, he assumes that his Verizon deniers already know that voices exist outside cell phones, but of course we don’t know that minds exist outside brains. If you imagine instead that the cell phone transmits an unintelligible signal unlike any the Verizon deniers have ever encountered, then by showing that they can alter the signal by tweaking the phone they’d be perfectly justified in concluding that the signal is a feature of the phone, and not transmitted from somewhere.
Also, the fact that we can affect consciousness via chemical or physical stimulation of brains does much more than just “chip away” at Egnor’s bizarre antenna-brain idea. When we stimulate brains, we don’t just change their output, we change the very “signal” they supposedly receive. By their own impression, people who undergo certain forms of brain stimulation *experience* anger, sadness, and all sorts of feelings, they don’t just *act* sad, or angry. All the evidence we (and dualists) have that the mind as an entity exists, and is separate from the body, is our subjective impression of it. And if brain stimulation can alter that very subjective impression, then modifying the brain doesn’t just change the mind’s output, it changes the mind itself, in any meaningful sense.
If by tweaking a cell phone’s circuits I could get it to swear at people, or cry, in a way that the phone, if it were conscious, could not distinguish from its spontaneous activity, than you bet I’d conclude that the voices coming out of the phone are its own property, and not coming over the Verizon network. Any sane person would.
The S-T boundary is intriguing, perhaps there is a layer with a fine dusting of erronium– resulting in egnorance.
Minor correction. I just remembered that it was the pineal gland, not the pituitary, that served as Descartes’ antenna for the soul. Not that it makes any difference, any more than it makes a difference that Egnor seats the soul (or has it hovering around or what-not) in the brain rather than the heart where the ancients put it.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
I wouldn’t bother. No subtitles.
I disagree that you can’t prove the brain isn’t a brain-receiver. We can test for that sort of thing. This is just like those cases of psychic phenomenon where the kook argues that it could be some sort of “undetectable radio-like waves” or whatever. That might have flown 100 years ago, but we know what kind of interactions can occur at different energy levels now, it’s some of our best science. If it’s not communicating through electromagnetism or sound, it’s not communicating, end of story.
I’m not a dualist, but if anything this seems like an argument for dualism. Obviously identical twins have the same brain, so why don’t they think all the same thoughts? Must be there are two different souls up there transmitting to ’em.
As someone said, this idea goes back at least to William James. And, to the extent that New-Age/”Eastern” flavor pseudo-mystics can be induced to generate any intelligible utterances on the matter, something like this is a fairly common view of the “mystery of consciousness” in those circles. So Egnor’s in fine wingnut company there.
But PZ gets it just right: receivers are cheap. Signals are expensive. Egnor would have us believe that the balancing act between cranial capacity and the size of the birth canal, with all its attendant risks in childbirth and infancy, is in service of building an antenna!
Thanks to Egnor, I now know why I am an atheist.
I put on an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie one day, and on that day, I lost contact with my soul, forever.
I’m de-lurking to do justice to Kurt Vonnegut, quoted woefully out-of-context, before the mad scientists hook his madly spinning coffin up to a generator. Kurt is up in heaven now, and he can’t defend himself.
Ardsnard’s quote in comment #30 comes from a SF story written by one of Vonnegut’s recurring characters, Kilgore Trout, in which a scientist discovers a tiny organ in the brain which acts as a receiver for all the great ideas that, until just now, he thought humans came up with. The scientist then realizes that by his own logic, his discovery came from the transmitter instead of himself, and he commits suicide.
Vonnegut is making more or less the same point PZ made. Please don’t confuse the dualist narrator with the materialist author.
Sideways- thanks for clarifying. That’s what I get for being in too much of a hurry to add any of my own commentary. The Vonnegut quote is from chapter 27 of Timequake. Egnor’s silly little argument instantly reminded me of Vonnegut’s (Trout’s) story of tiny little fleshy radio receivers in the brains of all the smart people in the world. Egnor’s inability to accept the evidence has sent him on a journey to metaphorically dissect the brain in search of a non-existant radio receiver. Also, I love how Vonnegut refers to brains throughout much of the rest of the story as dog’s breakfasts. Also also, the phrase Three and a Half Pounds of a Dog’s Breakfast would be a great name for a rock band.
Obviously identical twins have the same brain, so why don’t they think all the same thoughts?
Sheesh, ask a hard one — I’m not a scientist and I’ve only done lay reading on this subject, really, but I’ll take a crack at it.
Thoughts are basically an emergent behaviour of a complex system, involving the brain matter, the biochemistry, the physical orientation of the body, and all those other variables and inputs/outputs that you get in the human system. Even if those putative identical twins do have the same brain (and show me that same genetics = same brain first), one of a set of identical twins is not going to have the same experiences as the other, not internally, not externally. You could try, but good luck getting two human bodies in the exact same place at the same time.
It’s interesting how, when you (finally) reject dualism, a lot of that pesky so-called “mind-body problem” just goes away.
Ardsnard, #56:
Metaphorically being the operative word. One would think a brain surgeon would go look for the receiver himself instead of speculate about it on the internet, wouldn’t one?
@ Interrobang, #57:
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Identical twins are genetically identical, but they won’t have the exact same brain structure – different experiences, especially in infancy and early childhood when neural plasticity is at its height, greatly change the structure of the brain over time. So there will be differences, as their brains will develop independently from one another – each twin will have their own experiences. The brains still be quite similar though, unless the twins were raised apart.
And if they were raised apart, they’ll still share the experience of being constantly hounded to participate in studies by huge mobs of psychologists with dollar signs where their pupils should be.
I ask for Mr. Vonnegut to smile down upon me from above and forgive me for maligning him.
Maybe he is, Sideways. Perhaps someone is secretly supplying Egnor with fresh brains in KFC buckets, as in Vonnegut’s story. You keep on looking for that tiny receiver, Egnor. Maybe tomorrow is the day you find it!
I found something else of interest after rereading the relevant chapter in Timequake. Of the scientist who dissects all those brains looking for the receiver: “During regular working hours, he does what is paid to do, which is develop a birth control pill that takes all the pleasure out of sex, so teenagers won’t copulate.” How fitting. God bless ya, Kurt.
Wrong.
That which receives can also send. If there’s a new phenomenon involved with human consciousness, there’s no reason why it can’t be replicated, studied, and understood.
Sideways: Thanks for the correction.
Let me correct myself. “People who actually say such things, as the above quote, ;) demonstrate, very well, how people quite often just throw up their hands and say, “I don’t understand it and I’m tired of thinking about it so I’m just going to conclude whatever makes me feel good.” Lack of real investigation is the hallmark of the religious mentality.
To add to the growing heap of dualism chips, the selforganization of properties similar to observed neurological ones in neuron nets closely modeling the evolved biology is strongly indicating that the explanation is there, not elsewhere.
My favorite example being symbol-like representations spontaneously formed in models of the prefrontal cortex. Rule-like processing makes the neural net (and the brain) able to respond properly in new situations:
Furthermore, this network also showed powerful generalization ability. If the network was provided with novel stimuli after training – i.e., stimuli that had particular conjunctions of features that had not been part of the training set – it could nonetheless deal with them correctly. [ …] Further explorations involving parts of the total network confirmed that the “whole enchilada” was necessary for this performance; [ Bold added]
I would go one further here – to specially plead for the rejection of the obvious explanation in the function of the existing organ is one problem, and to plead for the adoption of a unphysical explanation is another.
Also, Interrobang describes how natural mechanisms maps more precisely to the problem domain, because dualism implies a whole lot of added problems. In fact, waxing philosophically for once, the above neural model implies necessity of natural explanations and the added problems of dualism implies sufficiency. Problem solved! (^_^)
To add to the growing heap of dualism chips, the selforganization of properties similar to observed neurological ones in neuron nets closely modeling the evolved biology is strongly indicating that the explanation is there, not elsewhere.
My favorite example being symbol-like representations spontaneously formed in models of the prefrontal cortex. Rule-like processing makes the neural net (and the brain) able to respond properly in new situations:
Furthermore, this network also showed powerful generalization ability. If the network was provided with novel stimuli after training – i.e., stimuli that had particular conjunctions of features that had not been part of the training set – it could nonetheless deal with them correctly. [ …] Further explorations involving parts of the total network confirmed that the “whole enchilada” was necessary for this performance; [ Bold added]
I would go one further here – to specially plead for the rejection of the obvious explanation in the function of the existing organ is one problem, and to plead for the adoption of a unphysical explanation is another.
Also, Interrobang describes how natural mechanisms maps more precisely to the problem domain, because dualism implies a whole lot of added problems. In fact, waxing philosophically for once, the above neural model implies necessity of natural explanations and the added problems of dualism implies sufficiency. Problem solved! (^_^)
Re: #57, 59: If you believe that ‘life begins (i.e. a soul is present) at conception’ then the receiver must be present in a fertilized egg. So is a full set of genes a soul-phone? Maybe the brain is just an amplifier, a $15,000 sound system, and a little screen so Ken Ham can swap text-messages with God.
PZ, you are wrong. You actually CAN disprove this.
Practically every faculty of the human mind has been shown to depend on some area/structure within the brain. Take empathy, for example – damages to certain areas of supraorbital cortex affect ability to understand the feelings of others, effectively preempting empathy. There are also many other documented instances in which areas involved in impulse control got damaged, leading people to start living “lives of sin” (i.e. partying, constant sexual activity, overeating, etc.). Furthermore, in several documented cases where tumor growth was the proximal cause of the insult, the problem reversed itself with the removal of tumor (i.e. with the repair of the physical brain circuitry).
How does this disprove Egnor’s proposition? Simple: if the mind resided somewhere else, it could compensate for the damage to one part of the receptor through other systems. Since this does not happen, the only conclusion is that such independent entity does not exist.
For example, take the famous case of a reverend (who was, by all reports, a decent man) who had a frontal lobe tumor and turned into a child molester…just to turn back (and be aghast at his thoughts and actions) after the tumor has been removed. Then back and forth as the tumor regrew, and was removed again.
If the soul is indeed independent of body, this would not happen. The soul would remain the soul of a decent person, not a soul of the child molester. If the soul dictates the impulses, desires, thoughts, and directs the actions…then there would be no need for various systems that control each other through excitation/inhibition.
The only dualistic option is that the soul sends thousands of independent signals: “molest a child” to one part of the brain, and “do not molest a child” to the impulse stopping structure. The physical brain then has to integrate and resolve these signals, overcoming the first with the second…failing to do so if the required structures are damaged.
In this case, the soul would have to be a schizophrenic jumble which requires the physical structures of the brain to actually become an integrated entity. Not exactly an acceptable option for your average dualist…and not really that much different from the straight materialistic perspective, at least in practical terms.
There are many thousands of other examples in the neurological literature that can serve to illustrate this point from many different angles.
Same genetics don’t even equal same liver, much less something so much more complex as the brain. I know someone who is right now burying a relative who died of a metabolic defect while awaiting a liver transplant.
This relative, who just died at 60-something, lost an identical twin to the same disease at the age of 9. Same genetics, same disease, but very different phenotypes and outcomes.
#65 –
Well, if the brain is needed as a receiver, maybe the soul continually broadcasts from conception onward until something picks up the signal. If the embryo dies for whatever reason before being able to receive, the soul just has to keep on broadcasting, regardless of the fact that no one is listening – exactly like hosting a show on a campus radio station, which most theologians agree is the closest earthly approximation of Hell.
On the other hand, you may be right about genes acting as a soul-phone. In fact, I heard about some fascinating work being done in that direction a couple of years ago, when my Anthro 101 class had a guest lecture by a TA. Apparently our DNA communicates with us via radio waves that we can only detect when we’re using hallucinogens. Why, you ask? Because people sometimes hallucinate snakes when they’re tripping, and two snakes in a double-helix resemble the double-helix structure of DNA. QED, fuckers!
Why can’t these hypothetical scientists build a boat? Are they all descendants of Roy Hinkley?
Egnor’s too stupid to realize that all dualistic descriptions necessarily imply a monism, and too ignorant to recognize that this fact has been commonly recognized by non-stupid people.
He’s trying to square the circle, and it just isn’t possible.
There has been much said about the logical fallacies inheret in Egnor’s arguments, but I think the most interesting thing is that he seems to be unintentionally making the case for the Buddhist point of view on the mind. P.Z. writes:
“It implies that a lot of what we consider subjectively to be part of the human experience are local phenomena, independent of the essential “I”.”
This is precisely what Buddhist philosophy teaches. In fact, Buddhist philosophy rejects the notion of an essential “I”. It’s not often spoken about, but the Buddha rejected the idea of soul. According to his view, the idea of “I” or soul was an illusion caused by the brain! P.Z. furthers says:
“Egnor’s analogy distinguishes between the externally generated signal (the voice on the phone) and locally generated noise (pops, clicks, hisses, etc.) but where it fails is in recognizing that that, even within his soul-transmitter/brain-receiver model, a lot of the locally generated phenomena are essential parts of what we consider to be us. This is not a reassuring picture of souls and life-after-death — it would have to be an afterlife in which we’re stripped of our memories and our personalities and our sensations. That isn’t an objection in principle, of course; it’s only a recognition that Egnor’s idea has implications he’s ignoring.”
Exactly. Except he may not be ignoring this point. My guess is that he is truly unaware that the implications of his argument acutually support another religion and run counter to Christianity. Whoops. Let’s hear it for comparitve religion courses! Egnor sure could have used one.
All I can say is that if I have a brain tumor, I’m not calling this guy.
So… if I drink alcohol, should I expect that the person I’m talking to on the phone will exhibit impaired judgment?
This “soul receiver” setup does have a whole range of interpretations dependent on the extent to which the “soul transmitter” is hypothesized to be impaired or effected by what happens to the “soul receiver” (while we’re in the business of just pulling stuff out of the air, that is). The problem is, I just can’t see any such configuration which simultaneously retains any kind of falsifiability and isn’t, in fact, immediately falsified.
It certainly leaves you with an array of choices. The argument can be either null or wrong. Possibly a whole bunch of varied combinations of both.
Egnor said:
Uh. Why? If a soul’s made of magic otherdimensional undetectable-except-when-it-talks-to-your-brain material, how does that solve the free will problem? Either soulstuff operates according to deterministic laws, or it behaves randomly, or both, just like the atoms in your brain.
There’s nothing special about quarks and electrons that makes them incompatible with free will. It’s just an incoherent idea to start with.
Wikinite asks for evidence that identical twins share the same mind across two brains.
Well- that all depends on what mind and consciousness is and how you define it.
We all feel comfortable in thinking of the internet as distributed across millions of computers. Nothing too spooky going on there.
What Hofstadter claims is that mind is pattern and that patterns can certainly be distributed over more than one brain. He also claims that consciousness is also diffuse such that there’s not a strict boundary between one brain-one consciousness. For instance, we have evolved feelings of empathy and an ability to crudely simulate the world within our brains.
How much of this is testable is up for debate, but Hofstadter has some great ideas.
Brain Hertz:
If you are in the presence of other intoxicated people it arguably does become easier to feel drunk yourself.
I don’t know myself- I’m a physicist- but I’ve heard that people sometimes attend ‘parties’ in which they imbibe alcoholic fluids together in a communal spirit.
Then maybe Egnor should propose that the brain is made up of lots of different receivers which pick up signals from many different soul transmitters each of which was created by a different god living in a different magical world. (Polyism rather than dualism?) But such a thought would likely never occur to him since it doesn’t fit in with his theology. Religionists always accuse materialists of closed-mindedness for not considering the possibilities of the supernatural, but I notice that they in turn refuse to consider any supernatural possibilities other than those they were raised with.
Wow, that is an old one (as I see a few other people in the comments have already noted) and a particularly damning one for Egnor to get wrong, given his alleged expertise; since the best evidence against it being the wriggle he’s looking for is relatively recent (decades to century rather than millennia) and in his own field!
PZ: “Here’s the deal: I can’t disprove that! No one can.”
Indeed. One might (MIGHT, if one was imaginative enough) wonder, for example, if neutrinos or dark matter (say, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles = WIMPS) are the friggin’ CARRIER.
Or perhaps it is due to a heretofore undiscovered field of force besides the four thus far identified (electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces and gravitation).
In other words, ANY investigator searching for a PHYSICAL MECHANISM responsible for the TRANSMISSION and RECEPTION of PHYSICAL INFORMATION to and from a MATERIAL ORGAN (our mind-generating brains, which manifestly ARE composed of the “ordinary stuff”) to and from an equally PHYSICAL SOURCE must necessarily disavow all supernatural ties.
Or it just ain’t physical. OR science.
Hey, this would be pretty good: we could get the supernaturalist numbskulls to reject the spiritual/supernatural basis of their nonsense as a precondition for funding their research in search of…of…what was that again?
Alas and alack. There’s no there there.
Sure we can. Design a set of helmholtz coils (sorta like tinfoil hats; they’ve been fitted to pigeons to test effects of the Earth’s magnetic field on navigation abilities) to fit on the subjects and observe them. If they begin to act mindless, Egnor is correct! Alternatively, take some IDists and examine them for the presence of helmholtz coils.
Egnor uses the cell phone metaphor, Deepak uses the TV metaphor. They’re using the same play book.
Deepak Chopra’s version:
Deepak also doesn’t seem to know that neurons have dendrites, he seems to think each neuron is is picking up the mind broadcasts.
Thanks for the link, PZ!
I like the phrase “Soul of the Gaps,” except that my affection for alliteration makes me prefer “Ghost of the Gaps” instead. (I claim that for a book title, by the way!)
Kurt Vonnegut was very good at following what other people found a comforting train of thought to its macabre, logical conclusion. To pick only one example, I offer this from his appearance on The Daily Show:
Perhaps someone ought to sit Egnor down and force him to read Cat’s Cradle and Candide until he shapes up.
By the way, I stole Jonathan Erich’s comment (#5) to update my own post. Thanks, people of the Internet!
Shorter Egnor: “It’s not my fault your wife became a vegetable after I operated on her brain. Her brain and who she is are unrelated. Don’t sue.”
The Soul Transmitter/Receiver hypothesis has no explanatory value. It’s like the idea that Earth was seeded with life from outside. We’re still left with the problem of finding out how the studied thing came into existence.
To add to a dead thread, because I didn’t think of this just till just now:
Can Egnor disprove that a car does not actually work through a transfer of will? I contend that the automobile is actually motivated (not powered) by the will of the operator. The will of the operator is transferred directly to the motor and transmission allowing the car to “go.” Yes, of course, the engine needs gasoline, because this where the energy comes from, and its power comes from the explosion of gasoline driving the cylinder, but its motivation, or “will to move,” comes from the operator.
Some of the scientifically minded among you might object, saying that a cinder block on a gas pedal is sufficient to motivate a vehicle. However, you are incorrect, because in placing the cinder block on the gas pedal, the person is actually transferring his will to the vehicle.
Prove me wrong!
Wow. That was a ridiculously satisfying exercise. Maybe I should go into pseudoscience.
Also, who the blank do the guys on Egnor’s desert island think they’re talking to? If they pick up one of these cellphones and hear “Hi, my name’s Mabel Smith and I’m calling from Portland, Oregon,” do they really still believe that it’s the phone doing the talking?
What if they call _each other_ on the cellphones?
Ah, this analogy really is in the not-even-wrong category.
Egnor digs deeper. That he would resurrect this ridiculous corpse of an argument from its long-time grave shows how little thought and study he puts into his position.
Egnor can’t even state his metaphysic consistently. Sometimes he posits a complete causal disconnect between brain and mind:
And at other times, he concedes that there’s a causal connection:
Then he combines the contradictory stances into the standard dualistic line, namely that the brain is necessary but not sufficient:
But if the lack of common properties between matter and ideas entails a causal disconnect, how can the brain be necessary for ideas to exist?
Maybe Egnor will settle into a coherent position if he keeps cranking out variations on this ancient theme. But I wouldn’t bet on it.