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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Evolution is neither directed nor random?
Please do tell me what it is. Or do you know?
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Please do tell me what it is. Or do you know?
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ngill09
Guest
Evolution is directed by natural selection, which is not random selection.Evolution is neither directed nor random?
Please do tell me what it is. Or do you know?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Just can’t get away from that word “selection” can you?
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Fr_of_Jazz
Guest
The reason is that usually those who opt philosophically for a purely physicalist account of the conscious mind in terms of the brain entailing one directional causality (brain to mind) are determinists. While there are those who argue so, the field is broader. Joaquín M. Fuster, who I mentioned, outlines a program of research that, based purely on neurological accounts, still sees freedom inherent in the operations of the prefrontal cortex due to the complex networking involved, the relational code used by the brain, and the vast amount of (name removed by moderator)ut through perception. He does, however, reject both determinism and the reduction of cognitive functions to physics. See his The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity: Our Predictive Brain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Deterministic psychology is rooted in philosophical materialism. Both are rooted in atheism, and Freud was the classic instance of this view.
Once you decide there must be a God, all the materialism and determinism pretty much go away and, except for the Presbyterians, free will rules.
Once you decide there must be a God, all the materialism and determinism pretty much go away and, except for the Presbyterians, free will rules.
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ngill09
Guest
I don’t see how non-materialism escapes determinism, or even how materialism and determinism connect. How does consciousness being immaterial divorce one’s decisions from the factors surrounding those decisions? It doesn’t seem to matter what consciousness is composed of, your decisions are still determined by your experience, values, character, and perceived outcomes, none of which are freely chosen.Deterministic psychology is rooted in philosophical materialism. Both are rooted in atheism, and Freud was the classic instance of this view.
Once you decide there must be a God, all the materialism and determinism pretty much go away and, except for the Presbyterians, free will rules.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
And how do you know there is no freedom to choose?
Do you know this because you do not believe in freedom?
If so, that means you believe in deterministic materialism. No one I know believes that without also being an atheist.
Even Jean Paul Sartre, who was an atheist who believed in freedom, finally saw the inconsistency and before he died gave up on atheism.
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polytropos
Guest
I’m not sure rejecting determinism is sufficient. To argue (for instance) that the brain is a sort of nondeterministic quantum computer does not seem to salvage free will.
The issue in the free will debate seem to be: first, the event (rather than substance/agent) causation present in most materialistic theories and, second, the conception of mind (whether among substance dualists or materialists) as acting efficient-causally (or, as you say, directionally) on the body. The prima facie issue with free will seems to dissipate when those tenets are dropped.
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ngill09
Guest
I’m agnostic on the issue of free will, but I don’t see how the concept ties to materialism at all, since whether consciousness is material or immaterial it doesn’t seem to escape causality.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Without God consciousness, whether material or immaterial, cannot escape causality.
With God, all things are possible, but especially possible is the infusion of grace, which is hardly subject to the principle of material causality.
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CHRISTINE77
Guest
Your brain is part of your body. It is a material thing. When you die, your brain dies and corrupts with the rest of your body. However, your soul, although it resides in your body at this time, is immortal. The way it works in concert with your brain and other parts of your body is a mystery that scientists just can’t seem to figure out. Guess they aren’t all that smart!
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Aloysium
Guest
Your brain is part of your body. It is a material thing. When you die, your brain dies and corrupts with the rest of your body. However, your soul, although it resides in your body at this time, is immortal. The way it works in concert with your brain and other parts of your body is a mystery that scientists just can’t seem to figure out. Guess they aren’t all that smart!
It is a mystery.
Neurosurgeons are as smart as people get.
People are definitely not getting any smarter and technology can give us only more of the same, perhaps with fancier colours.
So this is it: much to be in awe about.
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ngill09
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You’re saying there’s no such thing as advancement in scientific knowledge? Like that we don’t know more about the human body than the smartest people of the 15th century did?
It is a mystery.
Neurosurgeons are as smart as people get.
People are definitely not getting any smarter and technology can give us only more of the same, perhaps with fancier colours.
So this is it: much to be in awe about.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Oh, there’s plenty of advancement in science. Also considerable retrograde.
The smartest people in the 15th Century were not inventing nuclear weapons.
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CHRISTINE77
Guest
Science may know more about the human body, but not enough to heal it. So many are dying of cancer other diseases today that they have not not found a cure for yet, if ever. Most pharmaceuticals don’t really work any better than the herbal medicines they used in the 15th century, actually probably worse, and they pollute our water supplies too. The biggest life saver in the medical world was actually just getting doctors to wash their hands. Antibiotics are not working very well anymore. Diseases are still not understood very well in spite of scientific jargon. I’m sure an epidemic could happen again such as the flu of 1918 or the Black Plague, and science would be helpless to prevent it taking the lives of millions. New diseases rise up, out of the blue, some even come back after seemingly having been vanquished from earth.
So even if there are advances, there are regresses too. Science defiinitely does not have the ultimate answers to the world we live in.
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ngill09
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http://www.nj.gov/health/chs/lifexp/lifexp_files/image002.gif
25 years of life expectancy gain in the past century tend to disagree with you. The data simply don’t match your assertions that there has been little or no progress in medicine. Science does not have the all the answers, but it has the best way of finding answers, demonstrably.
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Fr_of_Jazz
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Right. I was explaining to ngill09 why people equate physicalism with determinism. Fuster accepts the phenomenology of free will (the first-person experience of exercising it), but in the book I cited is outlining a purely neurological research program to account it. So I mentioned him to show that not all people relying on an exclusively materialistic explanation of consciousness are determinists.
Above I laid out what I regard as the status of the question.
The natural philosophical conviction that the mind is an inner, first-person, immaterial, rational power in us is over 2500 years old. Despite their best efforts no neuroscientist nor team of neuroscientists has demonstrated that the mind/soul can be reduced to the brain or brain activity, i.e., produced an eliminative reductive explanation showing exactly how the mind is nothing but neuronal activity. They have not shown exactly how third-person neuronal events produce inner, first-person conscious life. I define the mind as the complex of cognitional, volitional, perceptual, emotional processes, and qualia in the conscious life of an individual person usually emphasizing rationality.
Unless one assumes what is to be proven here (that neurological researchers actually have reduced the mind to the brain), the phenomenon of neuroplasticity additionally shows that conscious mental choices alter brain structure and function and, therefore, that causality in the relation of brain and mind is bi-directional. This comports with hylomorphism.
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ngill09
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On the other hand, no one has ever shown that the mind is anything but neuronal activity. And plenty of psychological phenomena have been attributed directly to neurological activity. Is it so strange that, given the absence of any evidence of a ghost in the machine, one might conclude that there isn’t one, even if the machine is not well understood?
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CHRISTINE77
Guest
You can’t just treat the human being as a science experiment. Each human being is far more than a physical symptom of a disease. Modern medicine tends to treat the symptom, not the whole individual.
I’m not saying that science is worthless, but it certainly is not wholistic. It is so detailed that scientists can’t see the forest for the trees. You have a whole bunch of specialists working on one little aspect of their specialty. Who is pulling all this information together into a cohesive whole? No one.
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opusAquinas
Guest
Lets begin and end with Jesus Christ.
If you witnessed the resurrection, multiplication of the loaves of bread and fish, the healings and the other miracles would you still be asking this question to prove materialism? I did not directly witness these things but I believe the Gospel accounts.
If you had a mystical experience say, after confession or on the receipt of the Eucharist would you still be asking the question that there is a material non-theistic explanation?
If Saul of Tarsus gave a materialist explanation for what occurred to him, there would be no St. Paul. But our Lord gave St. Paul efficient grace.
So if a Christian loses their faith because of materialist explanations they are resisting grace. That is, sufficient grace is exactly that sufficient to not turn away from our Lord. The arguments against materialism therefore are sufficient.
If you witnessed the resurrection, multiplication of the loaves of bread and fish, the healings and the other miracles would you still be asking this question to prove materialism? I did not directly witness these things but I believe the Gospel accounts.
If you had a mystical experience say, after confession or on the receipt of the Eucharist would you still be asking the question that there is a material non-theistic explanation?
If Saul of Tarsus gave a materialist explanation for what occurred to him, there would be no St. Paul. But our Lord gave St. Paul efficient grace.
So if a Christian loses their faith because of materialist explanations they are resisting grace. That is, sufficient grace is exactly that sufficient to not turn away from our Lord. The arguments against materialism therefore are sufficient.
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