Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The winner so far ! The author writes things like: "Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. The computer concludes that it has qualia because that serves as a useful, if simplified, self-model." So, you don't actually see these very letters appearing on this very screen in front of you! Your brain just contains a "model" that "concludes" that you see them! There, that should clear everything right up.

An actual neuroscientist (at least one in training) is honest about where things stand . The findings: We have no f*%king clue how to simulate a brain. We have no f*%king clue how to wire up a brain. We have no f*%king clue what makes human brains work so well. We have no f*%king clue what the parameters are. We have no f*%king clue what the important thing to simulate is. So, we are just about there, hey? And note that this person is still a materialist, and still thinks we are dealing with a "machine" that thinks. S/he is just honest enough to admit that we have no clue how that "machine" operates.

Our distant descendants have forgotten movies. Upon discovering some buried in a vault, along with a projector, they are surprised to learn that they convey stories when watched. How do these stories "emerge" from celluloid? At first little is known about film or projectors. But future scientists study these things, and gradually understand them better: it is re-discovered how images are created on celluloid, how they are projected, what frame rates are needed to show smooth motion, what chemicals make up celluloid: all interesting discoveries. And thus, the scientists assure their compatriots, it will only be a very short time before it is discovered exactly which chemicals in the celluloid produce the plot of movies. After all, with all of their other new discoveries, it would be foolish to say that it won't be any day now that they will pinpoint the plot molecule (or network of molecules), and how celluloid produces plots will be fully explained.

This is, I think, an overrated book. It begins by trying to solve a non-problem: "A precise statement of the problem raised by the existence of sensory qualities must start from the fact that the progress of the physical sciences has all but eliminated these qualities from our scientific picture of the external world." This is nonsense. The physical sciences quite deliberately abstracted from the sensory world only those aspects of it which could be quantitatively measured. The "problem" Hayek sets out to solve is like the "problem" of where all the potholes went in a road map of New York State. What he goes on to attempt to show is how consciousness "arises" as an emergent property of a complex system of neurons. But what we get is a description of neural classification through patterns of connections of neurons, and then... magic! Consciousness! But Hayek shouldn't be blamed for failing here: as T. H. Green (among many other philo...

I have heard that Ken B. and rob are going for a hike in the mountains. I decide to put a stop to their stream of repetitive comments once and for all: I sneak up onto a path above them, and, as they pass, I cause an avalanche to descend upon them, killing them. Now, avalanches happen without anyone intending them. And my defense attorney will surely bring that point up at my trial: yes, it is interesting to know that there are other possibilities than "Gene killed them" at play. 1) But what would be nonsense for him to argue would be, "Ah, Gene didn't kill them! It was an avalanche that killed them!" Because everyone involved agrees there was an avalanche. The question is, "What started the avalanche?" Of course there was some physical cause of their death; what we want to know to reach a verdict was "Did someone intend that cause?" ________________________ In the Bible, when God is trying to persuade the Pharaoh to "let...

A person "sees a tree." He is asked what caused him to see this. "Well, light from the tree coming to my eyes." A neuro-phile says, "No, what caused you to have that experience was this brain state I detected." * The neuro-phile is obviously confused: these are not competing explanations, but complementary explanations from different points of view. If someone asks me, "Gene, why are you in England?" then "I came for a conference" and "This is where the jet landed" are not contradictory answers! They address the question from two different perspectives. _____________________________ A person experiences strange fits. Doctors are puzzled as to what is occurring, but he is not: Aliens are beaming mind-control waves into his head, totally disrupting his brain patterns. We may not believe him, but that will be because we doubt aliens are visiting the earth, or something like that. What would be absurd here is to poi...

In a lecture on St. Hildegard , the lecturer mentioned that's some modern "scholars" explain away her spiritual visions as having been caused by migraine headaches. It is certainly possible that Hildegard may have been having migraines. But what in the world does that have to do with whether or not God was sending her visions? When I see a tree, certain things happen in my brain. But it would be nonsense to point to those neurological phenomena and say, "See, Gene is not seeing a tree: there is just this electrical activity in his brain." Perhaps visions sent by God are so intense that they cause migraines. Or perhaps migraines are God's way of sending us a vision. I don't know if Hildegard was having genuine revelations or not, but I do know that whether or not she was having migraines has nothing to do with answering the first question. In any case, here is one of her migraine headaches for your viewing pleasure: It looks remarkably lik...

I flipped through the week in review section of the New York Times while attending to some other, serious business in the bathroom. Thomas Friedman was comparing ISIS to kudzu. The metaphor may be mildly enlightening, but Friedmans attempts to draw policy conclusions from it just seemed silly. Nicholas Kristof, who appears to be pretty darned white , is complaining about how "White people don't get it." Maureen Dowd is writing something about some female comic book character. In short, the usual middlebrow tedium. And then I found this , a piece questioning whether humans are actually conscious! This was a dive from middlebrow tedium into the utter depths of stupidity! And you know how utter stupidity is the La Brea Tar Pit of Callahan, so let's wade in! The piece begins: "OF the three most fundamental scientific questions about the human condition, two have been answered." What Graziano is actually going to ask are three philosophical questions, bu...

Consider these quotes : In his new book Free Will , Sam Harris says, "This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet." Jerry Coyne asserts in a USAToday column: "The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics." At least these fellows understand the logical implication of reductionist materialism: if reductionist materialism is true, consciousness is both useless and inexplicable. "Evolving consciousness" certainly cannot aid a "biochemical puppet" in any way whatsoever: his consciousness will have no influence whatsoever on what his body actually does, and so cannot possibly give him an evolutionary edge. As you can see from these quotes, this is no straw man I have invented: those are the words of two of the very leading lights of...

if he can't do anything? Let's say a manufacturer's rep tells you his company has developed an automobile that it entirely self-operated: in fact, there is not even any mechanism by which a human could intervene in the car's operations. But when he shows you the vehicle, there is someone sitting in the "driver's" seat. "What's he there for?" "Well, he could prove useful." "How is that?" "In case something goes wrong." "But you told me the car is a causally closed system: there is no way for something from outside the car itself to guide its operations." "That's right." "So how could the driver be useful?" "You know, he can reflect on what is going on. Be aware of the environment. Spot dangers." "So then he could take control of the car, based on the trouble he spots?" "Oh, no, impossible. The vehicle runs completely automatically....

The very attractiveness of Darwinian and NeoDarwinian theories of evolution was that they show how mechanisms can reproduce with alterations that continually fit them to the environment. The process was posited to take place without any design, and with no conscious intention on the part of the mechanisms to survive or to modify themselves. All teleology is forbidden. It should be obvious that while such a theory might account wonderfully for the appearance of ever more sophisticated and complex mechanisms, it is logically, not empirically, incapable of explaining why any of those mechanisms should ever become self-aware. All of the action in the theory is in the mechanisms: self-awareness cannot possibly make any difference to the fitness of these mechanisms, by the very postulates that made the theory attractive in the first place. At best, consciousness is some sort of accidental, weird by-product of mechanistic evolution, something totally useless with which we are nonetheless s...