Venom,
Thanks for posting that lecture. Watching it was a bit like eating a sweet and sour Chinese meal - with two contradictory tastes - agreement and opposition - competing for my attention!
Obviously the talk was meant for an American audience, for whom the question of whether to believe in one or other version of the Christian God, still seems to dominate. To the extent that he wanted to reinforce the idea that organised religion (with the possible exception of some forms of Buddhism) is a bad way to understand the world, I am fully behind him.
Strangely, the talk had something of a whiff of a sermon about it, and I don't think many of his scientific statements can be fully justified. (I attended many sermons as a kid, and they have a strange quality of mixing down to earth facts with unproved assertions in a way that takes effort to disentangle.) At one point, he implied that 'science' had more or less decided that the brain is not influenced by quantum randomness! That is certainly news to me! He also seemed to fall into the trap of suggesting that because we can determine the position where (most of) the processing of particular types of thoughts occur, we actually understand what is going on! It is also worth bearing in mind that in recent years the brain has been found to be remarkably plastic - particularly while young. This means that one part of the brain can, to some extent, take over what another would have done. To me, at least, this
calls into question what exactly MRI data is contributing to the understanding of consciousness.
Note that he constantly seemed to set up a choice religion/souls vs physicalism, and never seemed to even acknowledge other possibilities. For example, he never seemed to consider the possibility that other animals might have a non-material component (i.e. a soul).
Towards the end of the lecture, he began to push the consequences of 'naturalism' (roughly what we have been calling physicalism) - discussing the extent to which a criminal or a drug addict was responsible for his actions. This was OK, except that if he had dug a little deeper, he would have unearthed some of the contradictions of physicalism that worry me. Physicalism can never answer any value question - why is it undesirable to do X? Its only hope is to take a few things to be axiomatically valuable, and then show that doing X would impact negatively on one of those. It also
seems to end up blurring the meaning of consciousness until everything or nothing has it!
He was also at great pains to deny the existence of causeless free will, but to claim that ordinary free will still exists! This, of course, if to claim that everything that can do something - even a thermostat has free will - for if not, how do we distinguish between those physical objects that have free will, and those that don't.
I wish he had not been so keen to make out that from the scientific point of view all these questions were pretty much wrapped up. This was not really fair, and of course he never even touched on the explicit evidence for Ψ - even to deny it.
David
Last edited by David Bailey; 08-23-2008 at 03:32 PM..
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08-22-2008, 11:49 PM
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