Mr. Lundahl is Again No Expert on Consciousness and His Invoking of the Supernatural to Explain It is Groundless
Kevin R. Henke
October 7, 2022
In Henke (2022au), I cited some of Mr. Lundahl’s and my earlier work and stated the following about consciousness:
“In Henke (2022b), I quote Lundahl (2022a) and comment on how ineffective his primary source, Lewis (1960), really is:
Lundahl (2022a) also makes the following statement to me about nature and our consciousness:
“Other takeaway in CSL's [C.S. Lewis’] Miracles, you carry around yourself two very clear indications that nature is not all there is - neither reason nor morality can be reduced to matter and energy affected by each other in accordance with laws of physics and chemistry. The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ - to take it from a somewhat different angle - remains hard. We don't just need an intelligent designer who arranged our brains for optimal consciousness, we need (for purposes we take for granted, like refuting or like blaming) something other than just brain arrangements in our consciousness.”
I fully admit that I’m no expert on consciousness. Contrary to what Lundahl (2022a) and Lewis (1960, his chapter 3, etc.) indicate in this quotation, our thoughts are electrical and our brains are matter. [my emphasis]
Now, unlike the authors of my references (Harris 2010; Dennett 2006; 2018), Mr. Lundahl is no expert on consciousness or the human brain, and neither was Lewis (1960). C.S. Lewis was an expert on English literature.
In response to the bolded statement in Henke (2022au), Lundahl (2022s) claims that he has “… checked of [sic, if] neurology has made any advance in explaining why we experience anything like understanding, and the ‘hard problem of consciousness is still hard.” He then inappropriately cuts and pastes a section of the Wikipedia article “Hard Problem of consciousness”, which is shown here in green font:
“... The problem of consciousness, Chalmers argues, is two problems: the easy problems and the hard problem.
The easy problems are problems concerned with behaviour, and mechanistic analysis of the relevant neural processes that accompany that behaviour. Examples of these include how sensory systems work, how such data is processed in the brain, how that data influences behaviour or verbal reports, the neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. These are problem can be analyzed through "structures and functions".[19]
Chalmers' use of the word easy is "tongue-in-cheek".[23] As Steven Pinker puts it, they are about as easy as going to Mars or curing cancer. "That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century."[24] The easy problems are amenable to reductive inquiry. They are a logical consequence of lower level facts about the world, similar to how a clock's ability to tell time is a logical consequence of its clockwork and structure, or a hurricane is a logical consequence of the structures and functions of certain weather patterns. A clock, a hurricane, and the easy problems, are all the sum of their parts (as are most things).[19]
The hard problem, in contrast, is the problem of why and how those processes are accompanied by experience.[3] It may further include the question of why these processes are accompanied by this or that particular experience, rather than some other kind of experience. In other words, the hard problem is the problem of explaining why certain mechanisms are accompanied by conscious experience.[19] For example, why should neural processing in the brain lead to the felt sensations of, say, feelings of hunger? And why should those neural firings lead to feelings of hunger rather than some other feeling (such as, for example, feelings of thirst)?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems
Lundahl (2022s) then makes the following statement and lists the references for this section from Wikipedia:
“Unless the wiki has been vandalised, which seems not to be the case, we get these references from wiki.”
“3) Chalmers, David (1995). "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219.
19) Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. xii–xiii, 95–106, backcover.
23) "Episode 83, The David Chalmers Interview (Part I - Consciousness)". The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
24) Pinker, Steven (29 January 2007). "The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness". Time. Retrieved 19 December 2018.”
As I indicated in Henke (2022s), Henke (2022at), Henke (2022fq), and Henke (2022gq), Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information, especially if we have to worry about the possibility of vandalism, as Lundahl (2022s) admits, and unsourced materials as the Wikipedia article itself warns:
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
If Mr. Lundahl actually had any expertise in consciousness, he would be going directly to the peer-reviewed literature and examining the various sides of the issue, and not relying on Wikipedia summaries and the outdated and irrelevant claims in Lewis (1960).
Although the Wikipedia article mentions and cites a number of articles by Dennett and Chalmers’s other critics, a more recent article, Dennett (2018), is not mentioned. Now, Dr. Dennett is an expert on consciousness and, in Henke (2022ap), I recommended that Mr. Lundahl read Dennett (2018). Dennett (2018) deals directly with Chalmers’ claims about the “problem of hard consciousness.” From his statements in Lundahl (2022r), it’s obvious that he never read the article or even noticed my quotation from it in Henke (2022ap). In Henke (2022gk), I, again, had to remind Mr. Lundahl of Dennett (2018) and my quotation from it. It isn’t until later in Lundahl (2022s), that Mr. Lundahl finally noticed Dennett (2018), but even then it’s obvious that he did not bother to read it – see Henke (2022gy).
After cutting and pasting from the Wikipedia article, Lundahl (2022s) makes a number of comments using many quotations from Pinker (2007). Mr. Lundahl does not use quotation marks and he does not identify Pinker (2007) as the source for each quotation. Thus, Lundahl (2022s) is badly formatted and it’s often difficult to know who is saying what – also see Henke (2022gz). Mr. Lundahl is being irresponsible. To distinguish Mr. Lundahl’s comments in Lundahl 2022s from his quotations of Pinker (2007), I have used quotation marks and red font for Lundahl (2022s) and green for Pinker (2007):
Lundahl (2022s): “So, the latest update [i.e., Pinker 2007] is actually from Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 - but C. S. Lewis was in 1960 crediting people like Pinker too much with the capacity of solving this. He presumed the only thing he would eventually need the supernatural for were reason and ethics with valid universals, going far beyond what we have experience and therefore immediate consciousness of.”
Pinker (2007): “The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery. [new paragraph] Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.”
Lundahl (2022s): “So, Pinker has a prejudice against "an ethereal soul," and therefore concludes that thoughts are the activity of the brain, and this one obviously analysed as per physical, chemical and biological properties of it.”
Lundahl (2022s): “Now, I would actually agree, the soul is not using the brain as a "personal digital assistant" ... rather soul and brain combine to form the thoughts we experience, with soul as ultimate cause of consciousness, and with brain as regulator of its interaction with the body, which - by the providence of God - makes for different qualities of consciousness…”
Lundahl (2022s): “For a computer, we have our full consciousness without it. In this life, our souls do (at least usually) not have it without brain states. This does not add up to thoughts being the activity of the brain, whatever Pinker thinks of it.”
Now for my comments:
Obviously, Dennett (2018) is a more recent update than Pinker (2007) and Mr. Lundahl should have been consulting it and other post-2007 references on consciousness if this topic really interests him. In contrast, C.S. Lewis was not an expert on consciousness and there’s no evidence to justify invoking God or souls to explain consciousness. This is God-of-the-gaps nonsense (Mills 2006, pp. 85-86, 168-169; Stenger 2012, pp. 91-92, 102, 180-181). Anyone can invoke a worthless “God does it!” excuse in an attempt to explain away a mystery, but such baseless speculation actually solves nothing. We certainly don’t have an adequate understanding of human consciousness and this is probably because we don’t have an adequate understanding of the biology and biochemistry of the human brain.
References:
Dennett, D.C. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon: Viking Penguin: London, UK, 448pp.
Dennett, D.C. 2018. “Facing Up to the Hard Question of Consciousness”: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, v. 373, 20170342.
Harris, S. 2010. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Hunan Values: Free Press: New York, N.Y., USA, 291pp.
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.
Mills, D. 2006. Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism: Ulysses Press: Berkeley, CA, USA, 272pp.
Pinker, S. (29 January 2007). "The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness". Time Magazine. (accessed October 7, 2022).
Stenger, V.J. 2012. God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion: Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York, USA, 408pp.