Lundahl (2022s) vs. Pinker (2007) on Consciousness
Kevin R. Henke
October 8, 2022
Part of Lundahl (2022s) consists of a poorly formatted section, where Mr. Lundahl comments on quotations from Pinker (2007). Mr. Lundahl makes no effort to distinguish Pinker’s statements from his own by using quotation marks and liberal citations of Pinker (2007). Here, I’ve modified the format of Lundahl (2022s) with quotation marks and different font colors to distinguish the quotations from Pinker (2007) in green from Mr. Lundahl’s statements in red:
Pinker (2007): “SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.” [capitals in the original]
Lundahl (2022s): “The conclusion does still not follow. A regulator is always causing or responding to an effect, without being the ultimate cause of it, like the gearbox is regulating a car propulsion that comes from something else, that something else being the motor. Given consciousness tied to a body, a regulator of its states and the resulting influences (or lack thereof) on body functions and body movements is a fairly useful thing. And given the nature of the concept regulator, we cannot exclude that the thought is there by the soul, it is only regulated in relation to senses and emotions and states of waking and sleep by the brain. A regulator would also always accompany the thoughts.
So, C. S. Lewis overestimated what could be left to a nature starting out in lifeless atoms and states of energy and changing only in response to causalities described by laws of nature.
Now, the thing he did not see is, naturalism is not necessarily deterministic. However, Henke's naturalism is: he describes natural laws as what controls all of reality. This leaves no fluke by which consciousness could arise, and also no fluke by which consciousness once arisen could become a tool for logic exploration of reality far away from the reasoner who is conscious about his reasoning.
The observations offered by Pinker on what in our consciousness can be an illusion, and then the word "rationalisation" if anything underline C. S. Lewis' point. Such things, if in less detail, were known already in 1947 when CSL made his first and in 1960, when he made his second edition of Miracles.”
My comments:
As I’ve said many times before, there’s no evidence of souls, spirits or that God is involved in human consciousness. We’ve never detected or measured God, a soul or a spirit, despite this popular urban legend here. In contrast, Pinker (2007) is right. We can measure and correlate brain activity with certain thoughts. Mr. Lundahl wants to inject God and a soul into the activity of the human brain, but he has no justification for doing so. Invoking God and a supernatural soul into human consciousness is superfluous. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that anything supernatural is necessary to explain human consciousness from the underdevelopment of the human brain in infancy, into its characteristics in normal adulthood, and to extensive and measurable brain damage that may occur in old age. As Harris (2010, pp. 158-159) indicates, as scientists continue research on the human mind, religious claims about consciousness are becoming less and less relevant every day. That is, over 150 years of brain science has demonstrated that our views of the world really do depend on voltage changes and chemical reactions in our brains and not because we have a “soul.” (Also see Henke 2022ap).
Certainly, we are limited by the laws of chemistry and physics. I can look at birds and wish that I could fly by just flapping my arms. However, the laws of physics prevent me from doing that. Lundahl (2022s) needs to realize that the interactions between the laws of physics and chemistry are very complex. This complexity explains why meteorologists in many of areas of the world have difficulty predicting their local weather beyond two or three days. It’s not that the weather is controlled by the supernatural. The laws of chemistry and physics certainly control the weather. However, they interact in such complex ways that long-term weather forecasts are often inaccurate. Similarly, there’s no evidence or need to invoke the supernatural to explain human consciousness. It’s highly probable that natural biochemical and physical processes interacting in complex ways allow humans to have consciousness. Also see Harris (2010, pp. 105, footnote #111, pp. 217-218, and his references) and Henke (2022cL) for brief discussions on determinism.
References:
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.
Pinker, S. (29 January 2007). "The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness". Time Magazine. (accessed October 7, 2022).