{"id":3473,"date":"2017-11-07T21:52:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T18:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3473"},"modified":"2017-11-07T21:52:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T18:52:55","slug":"the-ghost-in-the-machine-why-man-is-more-than-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3473\/the-ghost-in-the-machine-why-man-is-more-than-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost In The Machine: Why Man Is More Than Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“This idea of immaterial souls… has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences.” <\/em>\u2014Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/strong>T IS POSSIBLE TO ASSERT A STRONG OBJECTION <\/strong>to our discussion of con- science, morality, and the traditional notions of right and wrong. We might think we experience the call of conscience, but how do we know that this is not an illusion? Religion tells us that these transactions of good and evil take place in the “soul,” but where can this soul be located? There is a powerful strain of atheism that teaches that human beings are nothing more than matter. In this materialistic view, the soul is a fiction, a “ghost in the machine” that has been invented by religion for its own purposes. After all, we never encounter this ghost within the material frame of human beings. What we do encounter is brains, arteries, blood, and organs. These are all made up of the same atoms and molecules as trees and stones, and are assembled by a process of evolution and natural selection into this intricate machine we call Homo sapiens. <\/em>From this perspective, man is a kind of intelligent robot, a carbon-based computer. Consequently, man should be understood in the same material terms in which we understand software programs.<\/p>\n

“If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul,” physicist Victor Stenger writes in God: The Failed Hypothesis, <\/em>“then we should expect to find some evidence for it.” But science has found none, which leads Stenger to conclude that the soul is a myth. Philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, “Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.” Dennett is not suggesting that the soul is itself a material object. Rather, he is implying that the soul is simply the name for the brain’sability to do certain kinds of mechanical processing.<\/p>\n

Physicist Jerome Elbert writes that souls cannot exist, because “if souls exist and are essential for thinking and decision making, our mental processes involve frequent communications from the brain to the soul and from the soul to the brain.” As a scientist, Elbert confesses, “I find the idea of such interactions very disturbing.” The reason he is troubled is that he cannot possibly see how an immaterial entity like the soul can move or influence a material object like the brain. He also raises a deeper issue. “If such interactions exist, the human brain is an interface to another, nonphysical world. Such inter- actions suggest that the rules of science apply to all of the universe\u2014 except for human beings…. This picture gives humans a unique position in the universe. This anthropocentric picture seems very unacceptable to the scientific worldview.” For Elbert, the existence of the soul jeopardizes the very nature of modern science.<\/p>\n

Yet there are equally profound consequences to insisting that man is nothing more than matter operating according to physical laws. If that is so, then we live in a deterministic universe and free will is an illusion. Some, like Francis Crick and E. 0. Wilson, unhesitatingly assert that human beings do not have free will. “It seems free to you,” Crick says, “but it’s the result of things you are not aware of.” Wilson writes that “the hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will.”
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\nBut Richard Dawkins argues that although we are the product of our selfish genes, “we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Thus, if we “understand what our own selfish genes are up to … we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.” If this is true, then by Dawkins’s own admission we humans occupy a unique position in the universe, because our minds can control our biological destiny. But how is it possible for us to rebel against our genes? How are we different from computers, who cannot rebel against their programming, or cheetahs, who unquestioningly obey the mandate to hunt and survive, or meteors, which travel in placid obedience to the laws of force and gravity? Dawkins has no explanation for this and doesn’t seem to think he needs one.<\/p>\n

Steven Pinker is even more cavalier. In his various books, he insists that the human brain is nothing more than an ingeniously assembled computer whose programming has been done by chance and natural selection. “The self… is just another network of brain systems…. The evidence is overwhelming that every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain.” Yet Pinker does not see why this view of man should threaten free will or purpose or morality in any way: “I can’t imagine how anything coming out of the laboratory… could possibly subtract from the meaning of life:’ In another book, he says that “happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish…. They are for us to determine.” Pinker writes that just because his genes are programmed for survival and reproduction doesn’t mean he has to act in this way. “Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless … ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes…. If my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.”<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding Pinker’s rhetorical flourish, for him to say that we can declare ourselves independent of our selfish genes makes no sense. Pinker, like a lot of other people, has chosen not to have children. The key word here is “chosen,” which presumes free choice. Pinker has not explained where this free choice has come from.Moreover, he has not faced the Darwinian objection to the content of his choice. If our genes have built us to survive and reproduce, how has the human inclination to avoid having children survived the process of natural selection? It is not enough to say, “My genes say reproduce, but I say go to hell.” This kind of reasoning would destroy all Darwinian explanations of human behavior. Moreover, how can happiness and virtue be something “for us to determine”? Where is this “us” that emerges apart from the designs of our genetic programming? How do we get the ingenuity and strength to battle a foe as formidable as our own nature? Having disposed of the ghost in the machine, Pinker seems to be surreptitiously bringing it back.<\/p>\n

Let us confront the central materialist doctrine that man, like the rest of nature, is made up of matter and nothing more. The best evidence going for this theory is that matter is all we can see, touch, and measure. Moreover, matter seems “responsible” for our thoughts, emotions, and perhaps even our moral intuitions. A powerful blow to the head can cause unconsciousness. Alcohol and fatigue interfere with concentration. Electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain can produce a desired emotional response. Patients who suffer certain kinds of brain damage lose the capacity to sympathize with others or to recognize shapes. Alzheimer’s disease produces physical deterioration that leads to mental lapse and a complete disappearance of moral awareness.
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\nAs consciousness, perception, and thinking all occur in the brain, Francis Crick describes the brain as a conscious, perceptive, and thinking organ. Crick writes, “Both hemispheres can hear what is being said…. What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there…. Your brain makes the best interpretation it can…. The brain combines the information … and settles on the most plausible interpretation…. This allows the brain to guess a complete picture.”<\/p>\n

In Crick’s view, the brain “sees,” “hears,” “believes.” “guesses,” and even makes “interpretations:’ But as philosopher Peter Hacker and neuroscientist Max Bennett point out, it is a conceptual fallacy to attribute qualities to the brain that are possessed only by persons.<\/p>\n

My brain isn’t conscious; I am conscious. My brain doesn’t perceive or hear things; I do. My brain isn’t thinking; I am thinking. Crick is guilty of something called the pathetic fallacy, which is the fallacy of ascribing human qualities to inanimate objects. Certainly we use our brains to perceive and reason, just as we use our hands and feet to play tennis. But it is just as crazy to say my hands and feet are playing tennis as it is to say my racket is playing tennis. By the same token it is wrong to portray the brain as perceiving, feeling, thinking, or even being aware of anything.<\/p>\n

There is a deeper problem with extending the materialistic understanding of nature to human beings. For starters, we experience the outside world\u2014the world described by the laws of physics and chemistry\u2014very differently than we experience ourselves. This is a point emphasized by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. All other things we experience indirectly, from the outside, through the apparatus of our senses, but ourselves we experience directly, from the inside, without the involvement of our senses. Only about ourselves do we have this kind of “inside information,” which is the clearest, most fundamental knowledge we can have. Based on this privileged and unique access, we know that the external account of reality, however accurate it may be in describingraindrops and cheetahs, is not the full story when it comes to describing ourselves.<\/p>\n

We are sure, for example, that we exist. David Hume said that we can’t really even know this: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, <\/em>I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hate, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself <\/em>at any time without a perception and never can observe any thing but the perception. Consequently, for Hume, the self is a fiction because it cannot be empirically located. But the remarkable thing is that we are conscious of our own existence prior to having any feelings and thoughts. Besides, our feelings and thoughts are experi- enced as “possessions” somehow distinct from the self, while the self is experienced directly. Schopenhauer writes that as we are the subjects of our own inquiry, the materialist mistake is that of “the subject that forgets to take account of itself.” Hume is observing sensations while ignoring the fact that he is the one who is doing the observing. He is allowing his indirect knowledge of external phenomena to trump his direct knowledge of the “I” that is having these experiences.<\/p>\n

We not only exist, but we are also conscious. This consciousness seems utterly basic: we cannot get “behind” it, and it is our entire mode of access to the world of experience. We seem to share consciousness with at least some other animals, but not with plants or nonliving things. Moreover, human consciousness seems to be of a different order than animal consciousness. For instance, consider the way that we experience music. From the materialist point of view, music is nothing but vibrations that collide with eardrums and provoke neural reactions in the brain. But we experience music in an entirely different way. Even our most mundane thoughts and experiences seem inexplicable when described in terms of physical and chemical transactions alone. A doctor, for example, may know more about my cerebral cortex than I do, but of my inner thoughts he knows nothing, and he will never be able to see or weigh or touch them, no matter how good his instruments.
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\nIn an earlier chapter on evolution we saw that there is no good scientific or Darwinian account of consciousness. The best that cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker can offer is promissory materialism: we believe consciousness is an epiphenomenon of material reality, but we’ll explain later how atoms and molecules can produce something as radical and original as subjective consciousness. But an explanation yet to come is no explanation at all. Until it arrives it makes far more sense to take consciousness for the irreducible reality we experience it as. Why let conjecture and unpaid intellectual IOUs make us abandon something as fundamental as our self-awareness? Why accept the mental as a projection of the physical when, as far as we are concerned, it is our indispensable window to all the physical reality we can ever experience?<\/p>\n

In addition to consciousness, we also experience intention and purpose. We experience these within ourselves, and we can effectively interpret the actions of others by presuming that they too embody the same qualities. Philosopher Bryan Magee gives an example. If the human body sitting across the room from me raises itself out of its chair into an erect position, transports itself across the room to a table, locates a silver box, removes acigarette, and places it into its mouth, I know that these events are occurring because the embodied object that I call a person wants a cigarette. I know what the other person is doing even if I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. Magee observes that if we were to try to give a purely scientific account of this event in terms of atomic motion and molecular transactions, it would be totally incomprehensible.” We simply cannot understand other people as consisting of matter alone. Pinker admits that “human behavior makes the most sense when it is explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams.”<\/p>\n

The materialist or “objective” understanding of human experience seems inadequate because we experience our lives as a unity. I have a multitude of different feelings and thoughts and experiences, but I experience them all within a single unified field, what Kant somewhat grandiosely calls the “transcendental unity of apperception.” The matter that makes up my body changes constantly, and yet I remain the same person. First I was young, now I am middle-aged, and one day I will be old, but through all these transformations I remain “Dinesh.” If I meet my college roommate, whom I haven’t seen for twenty-five years, at the airport, I might be surprised to see that he now has gray hair and weighs a lot more than he used to, but I don’t react to this by saying, “Who on earth are you?” I recognize that he is still my old roommate, no matter how much his physical constitution may have deteriorated over the years.<\/p>\n

Our self-conception is strongly rooted in memory of past experiences, without which it is not clear that the “self” would retain any meaning at all. Imagine if I could not remember the experiences that I had yesterday, or five minutes ago, or if I wasn’t sure that those experiences were had by the same person. In such a case I could not meaningfully speak of “my” past or “my” future, and my sense of identity would completely collapse. Through our memories of the past and our expectations for the future we maintain both continuity and singularity through our lives. Our lives have an a priori unity that we have no reason to disregard in our self-understanding. Therefore the idea that we are merely an assembly of changing chemical interactions is both unbelievable and absurd.
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\nThe materialist understanding seems to be guilty of a crude form of reductionism. Physicist Paul Davies explains this by way of an analogy: An electrical engineer could give a complete and accurate description of an advertising display in terms of electric circuit theory, explaining exactly why and how each light is flashing. Yet the claim that the advertising display is therefore nothing but electrical pulses in a complex circuit is absurd.”16 Davies’s point here is that a human being is a collection of atoms in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays are collections of words or Beethoven’s symphonies are collections of notes. It hardly follows from this, however, that Othello <\/em>is nothing more than words or that the Fifth Symphony is no more than an assembly of notes. There is a holistic unity to Othello <\/em>and the Fifth Symphony that seems ignored in describing them in this way. So too are human beings made up of atoms and molecules, but that does not even begin to describe the unity we experience in our everyday lives.<\/p>\n

The longer you ponder materialism, the graver the difficulties that present themselves. How can materialism account for the fact that we consider our accounts of the world to be not merely chemically generated reactions but true beliefs? British biologist J. B. S. Haldane sums up the problem: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Physicist Stephen Hawking takes upthe horns of this dilemma and finds himself impaled:<\/p>\n

“Now if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories in science into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. Our ideas about scientific theories … assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer toward the laws that govern our universe. Yet if there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions. And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion?”<\/p>\n

Here is Hawking’s solution:<\/p>\n

“The only answer I can give to this problem is based on Darwin’s principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce and so their pattern of behavior and thought will come to dominate.”<\/p>\n

Hawking’s solution is based on a non sequitur. Biologists invoke evolution to explain the challenges primitive man faced in prehistoric environments. But evolution cannot explain more than this. There were no survival pressures that required man to develop the capacity to understand the rotation of the planets or the microscopic content of matter. Moreover, evolution selects only for reproduction and survival, not for truth. Based on evolution, our ideas may be considered useful to us, but there are no grounds for presuming that they correspond with truth. Indeed, a useful lie is preferable to a truth that plays no role in genetic self-perpetuation. In reducing everything to the laws of nature we risk denying that there is any rationality or truth behind nature’s laws.
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\nPerhaps the strongest argument against materialism is the argument from free will. Let me illustrate. I am sitting at my computer with a cup of coffee on my desk. I can reach over and take a sip if I choose; I can knock the coffee mug onto the carpet if I choose; I can just leave the cup alone and let the coffee get cold. Now I ask: is there anything in the laws of physics that forces me do any of these things? Obviously not. In Milton Friedman’s phrase, I am “free to choose.” This freedom characterizes many, although not all, of the actions in my life. I am not free to stop breathing while I am asleep, nor am I free to control the passage of food through my intestines. I am, however, free to knock my coffee mug onto the floor. Now once I decide to do this, and actually do it, then the trajectory of the coffee cup’s descent is entirely determined by the laws of physics. My choice to send it on that trajectory, however, is determined by no scientific law but rather by my free decision.<\/p>\n

Kant deepens this argument in characteristic fashion by steering it into the domain of morality. We are moral beings. We have moral concepts like “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “evil.” We “ought” to do this and “ought not” to do that. Try as we can, we cannot avoid this way of thinking and acting. Morality is an empirical fact no less real than anyother experience in the world. Kant argues that for these concepts to have any meaning or applicability whatsoever, it must be the case that we have a choice whether to do something. Ought <\/em>implies can. <\/em>This is not to deny that factors both material and unconscious might influence our decision. But even so, we are at least sometimes at liberty to say yes to this option and no to that option. If we never have such a choice, then it is simply false to say I “should” do this and “shouldn’t” do that because there is no possibility of deciding one way or the other. For anyone to recommend one course or action instead of another is completely pointless. If determinism is true, then no one in the world can ever refrain from anything that he or she does. The whole of morality\u2014not just this morality or that morality but morality itself\u2014becomes an illusion.<\/p>\n

Our whole vocabulary of praise and blame, admiration and contempt, approval and disapproval would have to be eradicated. If someone murdered his neighbor, or exterminated an entire population, we would have no warrant to punish or even criticize that person because, after all, he was simply acting in the manner of a computer program malfunctioning or a stone involuntarily rolling down a hill.<\/p>\n

But Kant says that this way of thinking is not only unacceptable, but is also impossible for human beings. People who operate outside the sphere of morality we call psychopaths, and rather than assign them to teach philosophy we put them in straightjackets. We are, by our nature, moral. And it follows from this that we are free, at least to a certain degree, to choose between alternative courses of action because this is the only way we can think and act morally.<\/p>\n

Kant follows this train of reasoning to its remarkable conclusion: we enjoy at least some measure of freedom in the operation of our will. This freedom means doing what we want to do or what we ought to do, as opposed to what we have to do. Freedom implies autonomy, which Kant distinguishes from subservience to natural inclination. So at least some of what we think and do is not governed by the necessity imposed by the laws of science. If I give a dollar to a man on the street, the movements of our bodies are determined by nature, but my choice to give and his choice to take are free decisions that we both make.<\/p>\n

It follows that there is an aspect of our humanity that belongs to the world of science, and there is an aspect of our humanity that is outside the reach of scientific laws. Simultaneously, we inhabit the realm of the phenomenal, which is the material realm, and also the realm of the noumenal, which is the realm of freedom. It is the noumenal realm, the realm outside space and time, that makes possible free choices, which are implemented within the realm of space and time. Materialism tries to understand us in two dimensions, whereas in reality we inhabit three.<\/p>\n

To some, it may seem fantastic that all nature should obey fixed laws but a single type of animal, hairy, omnivorous, and bipedal, should be able to act in violation of these laws. But there is, and we are that animal. Moreover, we have discovered with the help of Kant that the material world is not the only world there is, and that there is a higher domain we rely on in every free choice we make. We have shown, in other words, that materialism is wrong, and contrary to its dogmatic assertion, there is <\/em>a ghost in the machine, which we may for convenience term the soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “This idea of immaterial souls… has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences.” \u2014Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves IT IS POSSIBLE TO ASSERT A STRONG OBJECTION to our discussion of con- science, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7478,564,7479,7284,7480,7286,7481,7482,7483,7484,7485,7486,7313,7487,7403],"class_list":["post-3473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-arteries","tag-atheism","tag-atoms-and-molecules","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-evolution-and-natural-selection","tag-ghost-in-the-machine","tag-immaterial-soul","tag-intelligent-robot","tag-intricate-machine","tag-material-object","tag-mechanical-systems","tag-nerve-cells","tag-philosopher-daniel-dennett","tag-process-of-evolution","tag-victor-stenger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}