Egnor talks about the demand for materialist conformity: “If I were a basic scientist and I relied on grants to live, I’d be toast.”
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As Michael Egnor told Pat Flynn, research of this sort — where split brains provide united perceptions — is an unacknowledged problem for materialism.
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The claim that we will find a materialist explanation some day, no date specified, means that we never reckon with failure to do so.
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Materialism is a totalistic claim. If the human mind is not simply the physical processes of the brain, with no remainder, then materialism is disproven.
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Comatose patients who are aware but cannot communicate in usual ways might be helped by new brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies.
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Human reason could not be open abstract truths, physicist Barr notes, if it were under the complete control of physical factors, as Sapolsky believes.
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Paulson’s Penrose profile is written as if materialism is going to prevail but that seems much less likely now than it perhaps did in 2017.
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With humans, it is likely more complex but identifying the neural correlates of expectation may help produce more effective pain relief in humans and animals.
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A little-reported 2021 case study published in Neurology Clinical Practice shows how resilient the human brain can be. A 29-year-old woman, CB, with no neurological or psychiatric history had a stroke, possibly due to medication issues. The damage was serious enough that a decision was made, with her consent, to remove almost all of the right side of her brain (hemispherectomy). As the study authors put it, “only a small disconnected right occipital pole was retained.” What impact would that have on her mind? The right hemisphere of the brain is thought by neuroscientists to play a specific role in “nonverbal” cognitive abilities. From Simply Psychology, we learn, Left hemisphere function The left hemisphere controls the right-hand side of the Read More ›
As the years wear on, consciousness will likely remain irreducible and the neuroscientists may end up having to address plausible claims for dualism soon too.
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As we learn more about memory, it takes a while to even process what we are learning but the research may help treat memory-related disorders.
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The fatal flaw in identity theory, as his view is called, is that there is no point of contact between the laws of logic and those of electrochemistry.
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Perhaps it will turn out that a “slush” phase — neither ice nor water exactly — is essential for a structure as complex as a brain.
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Kenneth Kosik, perhaps unwittingly, describes evolution as if it were an engineer. But then, the situation looks rather more like design than Darwinism.
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What we are really learning is that even the individual cells that mediate consciousness are very complex — even in the lab rats used in the experiments.
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The fate of the discipline may depend on how committed researchers are to finding out the facts vs. protecting a materialist view of consciousness.
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Apart from sheer complexity, the organization of the deep brain did not turn out to be what researchers had expected.
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Humans can tolerate mysteries quite well as long as we can fill them in with speculations, which in the end tell us mostly about ourselves.
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The debate will surely continue but it’s remarkable that it’s even HELD at Scientific American. Wasn’t materialism supposed to have disproved free will by now?
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To suppose that unthinking processes can somehow produce a thinking entity as an illusion is a sheer act of faith — faith in materialism but faith nonetheless.
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