We don't know if consciousness is physical, Period.

[AgnosticBoy]

On another thread, one member stated the following regarding consciousness:

Where you are begging the question is when you assume that the mind (i e. Something immaterial) is responsible for that, when the brain (network of neurons plugged to stimulus from the outside world + a bunch of accidents of evolution) can perfectly be pointed as the source of those behavior.

Before assuming something immaterial is responsible for a phenomenon, starts by proving something immaterial exist to begin with.

Not only am I skeptical of this claim, which is a common claim made by atheists, but I also get annoyed by the level of confidence that people have in the above claim. If the researchers that study consciousness acknowledge that it presents a 'hard problem', then why should I believe any claims that explain consciousness as being physical? In my view, there are good reasons to doubt that consciousness is material or physical. The way I look at it is that even if consciousness is physical, it is still unlike any other physical phenomenon in the Universe. The main reason for that is that the presence of subjectivity. As it stands, subjective experiences can only be observed by the subject. Also, they are not measurable nor observable from the third-person point-of-view. Don't all of those characteristics sound familiar to some thing else? Immaterial or non-physical (also being unobservable, not measurable, etc.)?

Please debate:
1. Is it arrogant to claim that consciousness is physical?
2. Are there good reasons to doubt that it is physical? Or do you agree with the point from the post I quoted at the beginning of this post?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #59]

And? We have fossil evidence to show that ape to human evolution did occur over some 6-10 million years. If population genetics can't explain this then it needs some tweaking. I'm no population geneticist, but if there were some math that disproved evolution I expect I'd be seeing it on the national news, or in the announcement of a Nobel prize winner. When that happens, I'll pay more attention.

You should pay more attention because there are many that are saying that evolution has problems. The eye is one of those problems.

• A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -evolution

And those are men and women who believe that God did not create the universe.

And your fossil evidence is a fictional story if mathematics cannot explain it. Especially with your materialistic worldview. More pantheism.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #58]

they found lots of amino acids in more realistic conditions, and that was 15 years ago. This stuff continuously gets refined as time marches on.

No they did not. It still has some of the problems that the Miller experiment did.

• But James Ferris, a prebiotic chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., doubts that atmospheric electricity could have been the only source of organic molecules. "You get a fair amount of amino acids," he says. "What you don't get are things like building blocks of nucleic acids." Meteors, comets or primordial ponds of hydrogen cyanide would still need to provide those molecules.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #61]

You should pay more attention because there are many that are saying that evolution has problems. The eye is one of those problems.

That article basically said that Darwin's original "slow and steady" view of evolution isn't the complete explanation, but we've known that for decades (eg. punctuated equilibrium). And they make the analogy to physics where quantum mechanics and general relativity describe different aspects of nature but no universal "theory of everything" yet exists. All of biology isn't "solved" yet or else biologists would be out of jobs. Here are some relevant quotes from the article:

"Plasticity doesn’t invalidate the idea of gradual change through selection of small changes, but it offers another evolutionary system with its own logic working in concert. To some researchers, it may even hold the answers to the vexed question of biological novelties: the first eye, the first wing. Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait,” says Pfennig.

"Doing right by Darwin isn’t about venerating all his ideas, he says, but building on his insight that we can explain how present life forms came from past ones in radical new ways."

“In my view there is no – can be no – single theory of evolution,” he told me. “There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything.”

"Physicists agree that the theory of quantum mechanics applies to very tiny particles, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity applies to larger ones. Yet the two theories appear incompatible. Late in life, Einstein hoped to find a way to unify them. He died unsuccessful. In the next few decades, other physicists took up the same task, but progress stalled, and many came to believe it might be impossible. If you ask a physicist today about whether we need a unifying theory, they would probably look at you with puzzlement. What’s the point, they might ask. The field works, the work continues."

And your fossil evidence is a fictional story if mathematics cannot explain it.

Really? Can mathematics explain love or emotions? Fossils are physical evidence that we can see, touch, weigh, measure date, etc. From these we can form a chronological picture and make inferences on how things progressed over time. There is an entire field of science that does just this ... Paleontology. It shows we evolved from a great ape ancestor, whether mathematics can explain the details or not.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Gracchus in post #0]

[Replying to Gracchus in post #60]

Here is something to consider and add to your understanding of mathematics. Drop a penny on the first square of a chessboard, then drop two pennies on the next, and continue doubling for each square until you have matched all sixty-four. (Surely, you can count to sixty-four!) Now count the pennies on the board. Let me know when you're done. Nature, reality, does not stand in awe of large numbers. (Neither do mathematicians, who are, after all, manifestations of nature, localized fractal vortices of spacetime.)
What we do know, though it seems you do not, quite a lot about consciousness, memory and the reasoning powers of brains, and how all behavior is a neurochemical reaction to stimuli from the environment, which environment includes the organism itself.
I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is how ignorant people underestimate their own ignorance. Learn some biology, especially neurobiology, and you may understand just how ignorant you will still be. My own ignorance is far more comprehensive than yours. I am ignorant of some realities of which you are completely unaware.

Wow, you really do not have the answer to my argument, do you?

But let's look at your so-called counter-argument of sorts.
I am actually not sure what you are trying to get at except that maybe you can calculate large numbers also but you did not do this calculation so you did not prove that. Are you donating the pennies for me to do this experiment? I would accept that donation to further my education if you wanted to do that I would need 3E20 pennies. Other than that this really has nothing to do with what we have been talking about because they numbers involved with your so-called example really do not approach the numbers we are talking about.

DNA is written in base four but let's use your base two example. We will start a bacteria which has about 6E6 base pairs. So let's say we have 6E6 pennies and all of the pennies are numbered from 1 to 6 million. (My example is much cheaper than yours) What would be the odds of me guessing the correct sequence of all 6 million pennies? That would be somewhere around 1 in 10E2,000,000 chance. Just so you do not get lost in the large numbers. So that means you would have to throw those 6 million pennies every second for 10E1999988 years. You are correct nature does not mind large numbers. But those large numbers make evolution impossible. In base 4 the probability would be more like 10E4000000. So in actuality, we would be looking at 10E4,000,000 years. This is why I say evolution is nothing more than pantheism. And that is for a simple one-celled organism. An organism like a human with 3.5E9 base pairs has a probability of around 1 in 10E2,000,000,000. The pantheism needed in evolution is very predominant in the theory.

Well, it takes about nine months to generate a human brain from a single cell, and a brain has about three-trillion cells. Tetraploidy, the doubling of already paired chromosomes is not unknown in the plant world, and even individual chromosomes are known to double.

The brain really keeps on growing until around the age of 25 not that I am being nit-picky or anything like that. So where did all of this information come from to build the complex brain? If you are relying on evolution for the answer then it would have to be some sort of pantheistic universal force. Because a preferred chemical reaction toward life has not been shown.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #63]

That article basically said that Darwin's original "slow and steady" view of evolution isn't the complete explanation, but we've known that for decades (eg. punctuated equilibrium). And they make the analogy to physics where quantum mechanics and general relativity describe different aspects of nature but no universal "theory of everything" yet exists. All of biology isn't "solved" yet or else biologists would be out of jobs. Here are some relevant quotes from the article:

Not that is not what the article is about. It is about the fact that there is no theory of everything in biology meaning the following.

• Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions.

So life evolved on earth is not known.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #65]

Not that is not what the article is about. It is about the fact that there is no theory of everything in biology meaning the following.

Did you read the entire article? The whole point of it was to describe how the EES crowd are challenging traditional Darwinists and arguing that additional mechanisms are at play beyond mutations and natural selection. Some of the examples you've previously claimed are adaptation and not evolution (eg. the beetle growing larger wings in a different environment, but the genes for wing growth were already present, or the example of the Senegal bichir fish and "plasticity"). Biology, like physics, is not a field where every problem has been solved, but there's no disputing the fact that mutations and natural selection play a big role, and we're learning more about epigenetics, plasticity, etc. as the article describes ... all under the broad field of "evolution."

So life evolved on earth is not known.

Assuming you left out the word "how", we do have a basic theory of how it diversified once it first appeared. We don't yet know how/what first appeared, but that is not what evolution is concerned with. It only describes how things proceeded after a first population appeared (by whatever mechanism). And research continues in trying to learn more about the details not only of evolution in general, but in how the first life forms did appear.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #66]

Assuming you left out the word "how", we do have a basic theory of how it diversified once it first appeared. We don't yet know how/what first appeared, but that is not what evolution is concerned with. It only describes how things proceeded after a first population appeared (by whatever mechanism). And research continues in trying to learn more about the details not only of evolution in general, but in how the first life forms did appear.

Genes and Natural selection is the theory of evolution. If you cannot understand life by understanding Genes and Natural selection then you do not understand how life evolved.

[Gracchus]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #64]
I think you missed the point. (I am not surprised.) Nature, the real world is full of very large and very small numbers. Even the extremely improbable is not impossible, as any examination of reality will disclose.
There is no mental phenomenon that cannot be explained by neurochemistry. You claim you would use money to further your education. I will again refer you to the series of lectures delivered by Dr. Robert Sapolsky to his class on the biological bases of human behavior. It would cost you nothing but time, which is a necessary cost of any education. But, quite frankly, I don't think you are serious about becoming educated.

So, here is the challenge: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=st ... &FORM=VIRE

[JoeyKnothead]

...
If you cannot understand life by understanding Genes and Natural selection then you do not understand how life evolved.

You've made that abundantly clear.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Gracchus in post #68]

I think you missed the point. (I am not surprised.) Nature, the real world is full of very large and very small numbers. Even the extremely improbable is not impossible, as any examination of reality will disclose.

I understand the point you were trying to make. But I do not think you are understanding how large the numbers you are trying to defend are. A googolplex is 10E100. A googolplex meters does not even fit into our universe. Our universe is 96 billion light-years across or about 10E26 meters. That means we would have to line up four universes the size of our universe to make a googolplex. So anyone that says that time makes all things possible simply does not understand mathematics.

There is no mental phenomenon that cannot be explained by neurochemistry. ou claim you would use money to further your education. I will again refer you to the series of lectures delivered by Dr. Robert Sapolsky to his class on the biological bases of human behavior. It would cost you nothing but time, which is a necessary cost of any education. But, quite frankly, I don't think you are serious about becoming educated.

Well, this author calls this belief or yours "neuroscientism." https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicat ... -ourselves

• The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith.

• The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activity corrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If we are just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organs designed to optimize our odds of survival — or, more precisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the genetic material for which we are the vehicle — then we are merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just our brains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, and our lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net that is the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

• In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, Dennett affirms the “prevailing wisdom” that
  
  there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain…. We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.

Dennett is expressing your belief. If this belief is true then we are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions and therefore not responsible for our actions.

• Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in Dennett’s words, “the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice” to explain everything else in the material universe.
  
  Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.

• Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent first because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object to the light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas your perception of the object refers or points from you back to the object. The referential “pointing back” or “bounce back” is not “feedback” or reverse causation, since the causal arrow is located in physical space and time, whereas the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a field which is not independent of but stands aside from physical space and time.

And this is just from one simple search. So I think your Dr. friend is overstating his position.