TagMichael Egnor
If the mind is immaterial, is human cloning impossible?
I agree with Mike Egnor that the mind is immaterial but I don’t think human cloning is impossibleThere are, of course, empirical implications of both the materialist and non-materialist understanding of the human mind. But the success of human cloning won’t weigh on the question one way or the other.
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Are Lab-Grown Human Brains the Next Big Thing?
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor thinks the hopes for humanly conscious lab-grown brains are faint indeed“Neural tissue grown in a lab cannot have intentionality unless it has sense organs,” Egnor says, “But such manufactured intentionality can only be about concrete things, not abstract things.”
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Four Researchers Whose Work Sheds Light on the Reality of the Mind
The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simpleNeurosurgeon Michael Egnor was featured in a short film as a supplement to the Science Uprising series. There, he mentions four researchers who have shed light on the non-material mind nature of our minds: Wilder Penfield (1891–1976): Some of the earliest evidence came from neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who was the pioneer in epilepsy surgery in the mid 20th century. Penfield operated on over a thousand epilepsy patients while they were awake (under local anesthesia), and he stimulated their brains with electrodes in order to identify epileptic regions for surgical resection. He carefully recorded their responses to stimulation. In his book Mystery of the Mind, (1975) Penfield noted: “When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying Read More ›
Science Uprising: Stop Ignoring Evidence for the Existence of the Human Mind!
Materialism enables irrational ideas about ourselves to compete with rational ones on an equal basis. It won’t work
Philosopher Argues, Human Reason Is Inferior to Animal Reactions
Smith offers to resolve the problem of human exceptionality by dethroning reasonHe hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.”
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Has Science Shown That Consciousness Is Only an Illusion?
Using clever analogies, Philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness is all smoke and mirrors
Knowledge is power, sort of…
If that’s ALL knowledge is, the resulting science is bound to be limited, says Michael Egnor
Inner peace: Is there software for that?
Tech billionaire funds neuroscience in a search for the secret of contentment
Can free will even be an illusion?
Michael Egnor reiterates the freeing implications of quantum indeterminacyMany say so. For example, at Cosmos, senior artificial intelligence research scientist Alfredo Metere explains, … there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel). He asserts that today we know the universe to be chaotic. Because the cosmos is clearly chaotic, we can observe time-reversibility only locally, rather than globally. This in turn means that free will is an inevitable illusion for us humans, due to our subjective perception of the universe, rather than its innermost nature. Read More ›
