Good one…..
There are interesting pieces at EN blog about a new book by M Egnor and D O’Leary titled « The immortal mind » that are relevant to this conversation. For example, this one about the idea that abstract thoughts can’t be explained by brain activity alone.
@Tim points at Egnor and the perennial Denyse O’Leary and laughs.
The “immaterial, spiritual power of the human soul” is needed for a “perfect” triangle, Mickey? Don’t make me laugh. 
My perfectly-materialistic CAD app can produce a “perfect” triangle every time. With such an abstraction, a perfect version of it is actually easier than an imperfect one – you don’t have to put thought into the exact imperfections – exactly how the lines aren’t quite straight, and how the angles aren’t quite what somebody might have wanted them to be.
As is ubiquitously the case with Apologetics, this blog post is ludicrously “not properly filled out or developed” – i.e. vacuous.
But then it would seem that they’re not meant to be serious arguments. Just a dog and pony show for the rubes who don’t know better.
1 Like
I have a hard time thinking of two people less qualified then they are to write intelligently on this subject. A quote from that article will suffice to illustrate:
From the materialist perspective, every mental state is a brain state, and no brain state — no physical state — can ever be perfect. Nothing physical can be exact, with the absolute limit of exactitude given by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. No physical line is perfectly straight. No physical circle is perfectly circular. No angle is exactly 180 degrees.
Yet our intellects can grasp perfection — an exact triangle, which can never exist in physical reality. So the challenge to the materialist theory that every mental state is a brain state is: how can a perfect thought be an imperfect brain state?
We can also have the thoughts “square circle” or “married bachelor.” Does that mean, in the realm of the “spiritual soul” that Egnor imagines produces our thoughts, square circles and married bachelors actually exist?
“So the challenge to the materialist theory that every mental state is a brain state is: how can a perfect thought be an imperfect brain state?”
This is equivocation between ‘a perfect thought’ vs. a thought about a perfect thing.
There’s no problem with imperfect thoughts about perfect things, so the challenge doesn’t need to be met unless the authors can show that there actually is such thing as ‘a perfect thought’.
Abstract thought cannot in principle arise wholly from brain processes.
They managed to stretch this nonsensical idea into a book?
No but this is the point. The thoughts about « square circle » belong to the realm of imagination, which is not wholly reducible to brain processes.
Michael Egnor certainly shows that the capacity of the human brain to generate perfect nonsense is limitless. Does that prove the immateriality of the mind? I think it rather proves the immateriality – in the “irrelevance” sense – of Michael Egnor.
5 Likes
The ResearchGate publication list for Micheal Egnor reveals expertise in cranial vascularity, but I do not see anything relevant to thought processes or abstraction. As is typical of the DI, whatever ideas are in the book, they have not been subject to qualified scrutiny. From the article, Egnor seems to be presenting some sort of weird reverse ontological argument, but applied to the perfection of triangles instead of God.
1 Like
They are not alone to have stretched this idea into a book. To name a few: Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Thomas Nagel, etc…
So Egnor believes. He has no good argument for that, however, based on anything I have read from him so far.
1 Like
Every time you drop names (usually inaccurately) instead of making a substantive point, does an angel earn its wings?
2 Likes
I am not denying that, over history, some very smart people have made thoughtful and articulate arguments in favour of a non-physical understanding of the mind.
I just don’t agree that Egnor and O’Leary should be included in that category.
3 Likes
Note, however, that what Gil has specifically claimed is that each of the people he cites has written an entire book arguing that “abstract thought cannot in principle arise wholly from brain processes.”
From Egnor, O’Leary article
The other way is to conceive abstractly of what a triangle is: it is a closed plane figure with three straight sides whose interior angles sum to 180 degrees. Note that this abstract idea of a triangle differs fundamentally from the image of a triangle that we may see in our mind or on a piece of paper: the abstract concept of a triangle is perfect, whereas the image of a triangle is always imperfect in one way or another.
Of course, planes are not restricted to Euclidean, and triangles do not sum to 180 degrees even for mapping the Earth. On any given surface, abstract triangles are not perfect, they are defined. There are no ghostly perfections floating around shoving notions into our brains. Is the suggestion that our brains are not capable to define things? For people who are less apt with abstract reasoning, is that due to neural limitations or do their souls need pumping up?
The ability to recognize a straight line is an innate and advantageous perception, not exclusive to humans, and recognizing a bent line is no more or less abstract than a straight line because it is in reference to straight.
1 Like
Pointing to these names was most appropriate to rebuke @RonSewell’s claim that it is insane to argue that abstract thoughts don’t arise from brain processes alone.
And it’s particularly piquant that you should accuse me of making unsubstantiated points when your contribution to this conversation at 48 is a model of its kind in this regard.
Here is a video where he offers various evidence for the immateriality of the mind, most of them coming from neuroscience observations/experiments. As for me, I am quite impressed by Justine Sergent and Yair Pinto experiments with brain-split patients (see from 8:10 to 10:10).
For those not willing to sit through Egnor’s blather, here’s a(n AI-generated) transcript of the section Gilbert was “quite impressed” by:
07:58
cut in half and they’re walking and talking. They feel normal. They have less seizures than they used to have. It would be the same thing as if someone just took a chainsaw and cut the laptop in half and it still worked just fine. Like there’s something odd about this. The follow-up research on that is something that still gives me chills. Um, and I I learned about this decades ago, and it’s it I I think it’s among the most fascinating results in cognitive neuroscience. Justine Sergeant was a researcher in McGill in Montreal,
08:30
uh, worked like about 20 years after Sperry, and she studied people with split brain surgery. And what she did was she found a way to present pictures of things like pictures of arrows to each hemisphere separately at the same time. So she put arrows up that the right hemisphere would see one arrow, the left hemisphere would see the other arrow, but no part of the brain saw both arrows. One half saw one arrow, the other half saw saw the other arrow. And she asked the people, are the arrows pointing in the same direction or
09:04
not? And they always got it right. But how did how could they compare arrows when no part of the brain saw both arrows? So she concluded that there was something in the mind that wasn’t in the brain. Year Pinto has um furthered that research um in which he tells stories to split brain patients where the first half of the story is presented to one hemisphere, the second half of the story is presented to the other hemisphere. But you don’t understand the story unless you see both. A good example would be if the
09:43
left hemisphere gets a can see a baseball and the right hemisphere can see a broken window. So Pinto would ask the patient what happened and the patients always answered the baseball broke the window. But no part of the brain saw both the baseball and the window. So there’s something in the mind that’s not in the brain. Wilder Penfield also studied free will and he did a very very interesting study. During these awake brain operations, he would stimulate the surface of a patient’s brain and if you
10:20
stimulate the right place, you can make them do things like make them raise raise their arm. He would ask them during the surgery to occasionally raise their arm themselves without him stimulating them. And you can’t feel your brain. Your brain has no sensory things. And the patients are under surgical drapes. They can’t see what he’s doing. And he would ask them, “When your arm goes up, I want you to tell me whether you did it or whether I did it.” And they always got it right. Hundreds of thousands of trials of this
10:49
in 1100 patients. No one ever missed it. No one ever got it wrong. And he concluded then that he couldn’t find any place in in the brain that simulated free will. That free will wasn’t in the brain. that you could always tell this is my will. This is not someone doing it to me. So free will is not a brain function. Benjamin Lieut did probably the most famous research on free will. And what Lieut found and I it it would take a while to go in details about how he did his experiments. They were they
11:26
To claim that this is “evidence” for the existence of souls is pure ‘God of the Gaps’. That the Disco’ 'Tute thinks this is worth publicising, and that Gilbert is “quite impressed” by it, is clear evidence of just how low their standards are.
1 Like
So getting Egnor’s opinions on neurocognition would be a bit like getting the opinion of an expert in computer PSUs on the intricacies of how computer programming works.
1 Like
It seems to be pretty good evidence against the immateriality of the mind. Why should an immaterial mind be so dependent on material links between the hemispheres? Shouldn’t it have it’s own immaterial channels of communication?
1 Like