We Actually Do Know that Literal “Spirits” Aren’t Real

[Analytics]

On another thread, I stated in passing the title of this thread, and @Calm asked me: "Maybe another thread because I would love to know how we can know this."

Part 1: Introduction

I have claimed that science has proven that “spirits” don’t exist. What I mean by this is that there isn’t a “ghost in the machine” and that everything we are, including our sense of self, are the result of purely biological processes made of the mundane stuff we are made of, and that when people have an experience of floating outside of their bodies in NDEs and the like, these experiences are illusions driven by the physical processes of the brain.

I don’t particularly like this belief, and I never wanted to believe it. However, I did want to know the truth. By reading “the best of books”, I’ve found that multiple fields of science all converge on this idea: we are purely biological beings, and there isn’t and can’t be a ghost in the machine.

The predictive power of science does make learning this exciting and satisfying. An excellent example of this is how Charles Darwin predicted that the earth is very old, which prediction flew in the face of conventional wisdom that the earth couldn’t be very old because if it was, the sun would have burnt out by now. But by looking at the time required for evolution and geological processes, Darwin correctly predicted that there had to have been a then-unknown power source to the sun that caused it to be able to burn for at least many hundreds of millions of years, and that prediction turned out to be correct.

An excellent book that goes into this more is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

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By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when in 1859, in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete. The assertion was remarkable partly for being so arrestingly specific but even more for flying in the face of accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth.3 It proved so contentious that Darwin withdrew it from the third edition of the book. The problem at its heart remained, however. Darwin and his geological friends needed the Earth to be old, but no-one could come up with a way to make it so.

Unfortunately for Darwin, and for progress, the question came to the attention of the great Lord Kelvin (who, though indubitably great, was then still just plain William Thomson; he wouldn’t be elevated to the peerage until 1892, when he was sixty-eight years old and nearing the end of his career, but I shall follow the convention here of using the name retroactively). Kelvin was one of the most extraordinary figures of the nineteenth century—indeed, of any century. The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, no intellectual slouch himself, wrote that Kelvin had by far the greatest “intelligence and lucidity, and mobility of thought” of any man he had ever met. “I felt quite wooden beside him sometimes,” he added, a bit dejectedly. 

The sentiment is understandable, for Kelvin really was a kind of Victorian superman...

He had really only one flaw and that was an inability to calculate the correct age of the Earth. The question occupied much of the second half of his career, but he never came anywhere near getting it right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article in a popular magazine called Macmillan’s, suggested that the Earth was 98 million years old, but cautiously allowed that the figure could be as low as 20 million years or as high as 400 million. With remarkable prudence he acknowledged that his calculations could be wrong if “sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation”—but it was clear that he thought that unlikely. With the passage of time 

Kelvin would become more forthright in his assertions and less correct. He continually revised his estimates downwards, from a maximum of 400 million years to 100 million years, then to 50 million years and finally, in 1897, to a mere 24 million years. Kelvin wasn’t being wilful. It was simply that there was nothing in physics that could explain how a body the size of the Sun could burn continuously for more than a few tens of millions of years at most without exhausting its fuel. Therefore it followed that the Sun and its planets were relatively, but inescapably, youthful. The problem was that nearly all the fossil evidence contradicted this, and suddenly in the nineteenth century there was a lot of fossil evidence.

 

Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition (pp. 105-108). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

In the following three posts, I’ll provide evidence from three different fields that all point to the same conclusion—there isn’t a ghost in the machine.

 

[Analytics]

Part 2: Biology

Among the freshest and most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and its sequel Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari. Professor Harari is a history professor at the Hebrew University at Jerusalem and the books were originally written in Hebrew:

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We want to believe that human lives really are superior [to other animals] in some fundamental way. We Sapiens love telling ourselves that we enjoy some magical quality that not only accounts for our immense  power, but also gives moral justification for our privileged status. What is this unique human spark? 

The traditional monotheist answer is that only Sapiens have eternal souls. Whereas the body decays and rots, the soul journeys on towards salvation or damnation, and will experience either everlasting joy in paradise or an eternity of misery in hell. Since pigs and other animals have no soul, they don’t take part in this cosmic drama. They live only for a few years, and then die and fade into nothingness. We should therefore care far more about eternal human souls than about ephemeral pigs. 

This is no kindergarten fairy tale, but an extremely powerful myth that continues to shape the lives of billions of humans and animals in the early twenty-first century. The belief that humans have eternal souls whereas animals are just evanescent bodies is a central pillar of our legal, political and economic system. It explains why, for example, it is perfectly okay for humans to kill animals for food, or even just for the fun of it. 

However, our latest scientific discoveries flatly contradict this monotheist myth. True, laboratory experiments confirm the accuracy of one part of the myth: just as monotheist religions say, animals have no souls. All the careful studies and painstaking examinations have failed to discover any trace of a soul in pigs, rats or rhesus monkeys. Alas, the same laboratory experiments undermine the second and far more important part of the monotheist myth, namely, that humans do have a soul. Scientists have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains. But they have so far discovered no magical spark. There is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls. 

If that were all, we could well argue that scientists just need to keep looking. If they haven’t found the soul yet, it is because they haven’t looked carefully enough. Yet the life sciences doubt the existence of soul not just due to lack of evidence, but rather because the very idea of soul contradicts the most fundamental principles of evolution.

 

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (pp. 102-103). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Mormons, of course, believe that pigs, rats, and monkey’s have souls. As we trace our ancestry back, we eventually come to an ancestor that is distinctly not a homo sapiens, but rather is a homo erectus or other such creature. And if we trace it back further, we get to an ancestor that isn’t even human in a broad sense, but rather is a non-human ape. And if we trace it back further, we get to an ancestor that isn’t even an ape. As we trace this process back a few billion years eventually we get to an ancestor that isn’t even multi-cellular.

Something like 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. If, say, homo erectus had a homo-erectus spirit, what happened when homo erectus went extinct? Was that timed to transpire when the limited supply of homo erectus spirits was exhausted?

Biology insists that all other creatures on the planet are literally our cousins—we share common ancestry. It just doesn’t have room for a cutoff between humans with human spirits that were all created in the image of God from non-human parent.

 

[Analytics]

Part 3: Neuroscience

Part of being human is the feeling and perception that while you have a body, there is a more fundamental part of you that is distinct from your body that is the thinking, feeling, self-aware entity that drives the body. 

As neuroscientists have dived into how the brain works, tens of thousands of experiments have been done about how the brain works and the relationship between what people think, feel, experience, do, and choose, and the neuroscience of the brain. A subset of experiments have to do with intractable epilepsy patients who, since the mid 20^th century, have had the radical treatment of surgically severing the corpus callosum—the large track of nerves that connects the left hemisphere of the brain with the right.

A highly readable and sympathetic book about this by a superlatively qualified researcher is the book Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael Gazzaniga:

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We already knew from the study of neurological patients that the brain had two completely different neuronal pathways for generating spontaneous facial expressions and voluntary ones. Only the dominant left hemisphere could generate voluntary facial expressions. In patients who have a particular lesion in their right hemisphere that disrupts communication between the hemispheres, only the right side of the face responds when asked to smile, and the left side remains immobile. If the same patient is told a joke and spontaneously smiles, however, his facial muscles respond normally bilaterally, because a different pathway is used that doesn’t require communication between the hemispheres. The exact opposite is true with Parkinson patients who have damage in their extrapyramidal systems, the part of the motor system that is involved with the coordination of movements. They are unable to have spontaneous expressions, but can voluntarily control their facial muscles. In our split-brain experiments, we figured that if we gave a command to the left hemisphere of a patient, then the right side of the face should respond first, and this is exactly what happened. When the left hemisphere of a split-brain patient sees the command to smile or frown, the right side of the face responds about 180 milliseconds before the left side responds; the time lag is due to the right hemisphere’s having to get the somatic feedback through subcortical pathways. 

All of these findings led to a picture of many specializations distributed around the brain. But another conclusion seemed to follow our studies: With the observation that each hemisphere could possess information outside the realm of awareness of the other half-brain, it suggested that the surgery had induced a state of double consciousness. 

Double Consciousness? 

Not everyone was excited by these findings. While riding up in the elevator at Rockefeller University, George Miller introduced me to the great American psychologist William Estes and said, “You know Mike, he is the guy that discovered the split-brain phenomenon in humans?” and Estes responded, “Great, now we have two systems we don’t understand!” It appeared that split-brain surgery produced two separate conscious hemispheres and, at the time, we thought there were two conscious systems: mind left and mind right. 

In 1968 Roger Sperry wrote: “One of the more general and also more interesting and striking features of this syndrome may be summarized as an apparent doubling in most of the realms of conscious awareness. Instead of the normally unified single stream of consciousness, these patients behave in many ways as if they have two independent streams of conscious awareness, one in each hemisphere, each of which is cut off from and out of contact with the mental experiences of the other. In other words, each hemisphere seems to have its own separate and private sensations; its own perceptions; its own concepts; and its own impulses to act, with related volitional, cognitive, and learning experiences.”

Four years later I went overboard and added even more to this: “Over the past ten years we have collected evidence that, following midline section of the cerebrum, common normal conscious unity is disrupted, leaving the split-brain patient with two minds (at least), mind left and mind right. They coexist as two completely conscious entities, in the same manner as conjoined twins are two completely separate persons.” This posed the problem of whether each consciousness had its own protagonist: Were there then two selves? Were there also two free wills? Why aren’t the two halves of the brain conflicting over which half is in charge? Is one half in charge? Were the two selves of the brain trapped in a body that could only be at one place at one time? Which half decided where the body would be? WHY WHY WHY was there this apparent feeling of unity? Was consciousness and the sense of self actually located in one half of the brain?

 

Gazzaniga, Michael S.. Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (pp. 65-67). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The amount of clinical evidence on this is overwhelming. If you cut a physical brain in half, you are left with two distinct senses of self, both of which are completely unaware of the other. If there was one spirit driving things, why does splitting a brain result in two distinct personalities, each with its own unique sense of self?

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Understanding that the brain works automatically and follows the laws of the natural world is both heartening and revealing. Heartening because we can be confident the decision-making device, the brain, has a reliable structure in place to execute decisions for actions. It is also revealing, because it makes clear that the whole arcane issue about free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs held at particular times in human history that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge about the nature of our universe. As John Doyle has put it to me: 

Somehow we got used to the idea that when a system appears to exhibit coherent, integrated function and behavior, there must be some “essential” and, importantly, central or centralized controlling element that is responsible. We are deeply essentialist, and our left brain will find it. And as you point out, we’ll make up something if we can’t find it. We call it a homunculus, mind, soul, gene, etc. . . . But it is rarely there in the usual reductionist sense. . . . That doesn’t mean there isn’t in fact some “essence” that is responsible, it’s just distributed. It’s in the protocols, the rules, the algorithms, the software. It’s how cells, ant hills, Internets, armies, brains, really work. It’s difficult for us because it doesn’t reside in some box somewhere, indeed it would be a design flaw if it did because that box would be a single point of failure. It’s, in fact, important that it not be in the modules but in the rules that they must obey.

 

Gazzaniga, Michael S.. Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (pp. 241-242). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Edited May 3, 2024 by Analytics

[Analytics]

Part 4 (final): Physics

My final proof that there is no such thing as a soul is the most subtle and most qualified, but also the strongest. Fully understanding it requires having a layman’s understanding of effective quantum field theory, the Core theory, crossing symmetry, and the exhaustive results of physics experiments the have been completed over the last 80 years or so, paying particular attention to the implications of what’s been done in particle accelerators. To understand the strength and basis of this argument, along with its qualifications, is a ton of material, but you can get a very good understanding of it by reading The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll.

The bottom line is that while we don’t know everything about how the universe works, we do know some things. Effective Quantum Field Theory explicitly says where it works in terms of the strength of forces over different distances. It doesn’t explain things across huge distances (that’s why dark energy and dark matter are still mysteries), and it doesn’t have answers for what might exist at distances smaller than quarks. But within the bounds of its domain of applicability, “it’s been spectacularly successful at accounting for every experiment ever performed in a laboratory here on Earth.”

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I’m not claiming that we know everything, or anywhere close to it. I’m claiming that we know some things, and that those things are enough to rule out some other things—including bending spoons with the power of your mind. The reason we can say that with confidence relies heavily on the specific form that the laws of physics take. Modern physics not only tells us that certain things are true; it comes with a built-in way of delineating the limits of that knowledge—where our theories cease to be reliable.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 155). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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The verdict is unambiguous: we’ve found all of the particles that our best current technology enables us to find. Crossing symmetry assures us that, if there were any particles lurking around us that interact with ordinary matter strongly enough to make a difference to the behavior of everyday stuff, those particles should have easily been produced in experiments. But there’s nothing there. 

There are probably more particles yet to be found. They just won’t be relevant to our everyday world. The fact that we haven’t yet found such particles tells us a great deal about what properties they must have; that’s the power of quantum field theory. Any particle that we haven’t yet detected must have one of the following features: 

1-       It could be so very weakly interacting with ordinary matter that it is almost never produced; or— 

2-       2- It could be extremely massive, so that it takes collisions at energies even higher than what our best accelerators can achieve in order to make it; or— 

3-       It could be extremely short-lived, so that it gets made but then almost immediately decays away into other particles. 

If any particle we haven’t yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now.

 

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 182-183). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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The Core Theory of contemporary physics describes the atoms and forces that constitute our brains and bodies in exquisite detail, in terms of a rigid and unforgiving set of formal equations that leaves no wiggle room for intervention by nonmaterial influences. The way we talk about immaterial souls, meanwhile, has not risen to that level of sophistication. To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way that we haven’t yet detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed. How should we modify the Core Theory equation (shown in the Appendix) to allow for the soul to influence the particles in our body? It’s a substantial hurdle to leap.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 212). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

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One of the most impressive properties of the Core Theory of the physics underlying everyday life is its rigidity. We specify a particular physical situation, such as a configuration of atoms and ions in a neuron in your brain, and the theory predicts with magnificent accuracy how that situation will evolve. At the microscopic scale, quantum mechanics implies that individual measurement outcomes are expressed in probabilities rather than certainties, but those probabilities are unambiguously fixed by the theory, and when we aggregate many particles the overall behavior becomes fantastically predictable (at least in principle, to a Laplace’s Demon–level intellect). There are no vague or unspecified pieces waiting to be filled in; the equations predict how matter and energy behave in any given situation, whether it’s the Earth revolving around the sun, or electrochemical impulses cascading through your central nervous system. This rigidity makes the modern version of Princess Elisabeth’s question enormously more pressing than it had been in the seventeenth century. Whether you are a physicalist who believes that there is nothing to us other than the particles of the Core Theory, or someone who thinks that there is some crucial nonphysical component to a human being, everyone admits that the particles are part of who we are. If you want to say there is something else, you have to explain how that something else interacts with the particles. How, in other words, the Core Theory is incomplete, and has to change. To address this issue seriously, we wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “Soul Theory” that is as rigorous and well developed as the Core Theory of physics. We would, however, need to be specific and quantitative about how the Core Theory could possibly be changed. There needs to be a way that “soul stuff” interacts with the fields of which we are made—with electrons, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge? Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated? Is there “virtual soul stuff” as well as “real soul stuff,” and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles? Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes? Is the soul a kind of “hidden variable” playing an important role in quantum ontology?

If you want to be a dualist and believe in an immaterial soul that plays any role whatsoever in who we are as human beings, these questions are not optional. We’re not rigging the game by demanding a full-blown mathematical theory of the soul itself; we’re simply asking how the soul is supposed to affect the mathematical theory of the quantum fields that we already have....

It might seem wrongheaded to draw such sweeping conclusions about human capacities and limitations from something as narrow and esoteric as quantum field theory. Quantum fields, however, are indisputably part of who we are. If they are all of who we are, we should have no problem drawing implications of that fact for our lives. If there is something in addition to the quantum fields, it is reasonable to seek an understanding of (and evidence for) that something that is just as precise and rigorous and reproducible as the one we have for field theory.

If the world we see in our experiments is just a tiny part of a much bigger reality, the rest of reality must somehow act upon the world we do see; otherwise it doesn’t matter very much. And if it does act upon us, that implies a necessary alteration in the laws of physics as we understand them. Not only do we have no strong evidence in favor of such alterations; we don’t even have any good proposals for what form they could possibly take.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 220-221). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

Edited May 3, 2024 by Analytics

[Nofear]

I wish I could find the quote from a well known philosopher atheist but can't. The concept stands on its own so paraphrasing, he said that the great danger and conceit of materialism is to suppose that what we know about the world now can explain everything. In other words, we often try to find explanations for all observed phenomena based on what we current understanding. I think your Lord Kelvin is an excellent example of this. His calculations based on the known physics was quite correct. Key word: known. But the explanation of the world defied his understanding because his understanding was woefully incomplete.

The brain is an absolutely amazing thing. We have incredibly vast amounts of data on it. I have a daughter who had some trauma to her brain and it caused all manner of issues. Had some of the best look at her and try to understand, including the Mayo Clinic. They were completely flummoxed. Yet, for all that the assumption is still that it was physiological problem with the brain ever if we couldn't figure it out. We just started using some fairly cutting edge neurostimulation therapy to help facilitate her healing. This is only possible because of recent advances in understanding how the brain works. It's awesome.

As a faithful, believing latter-day saint, I have no problem with this approach. Doesn't challenge my theology in any way whatsoever. One way of reading your thread is to understand you as saying that you think it should challenge my theology. I can explain my position in more clarity later. In the meantime, I'll leave it to you try to understand the position of the opposite side of the argument.

[the narrator]

The end of my belief in traditional theism (broadly anything involving a sentient deity) largely began with a complete loss of a belief in the continuing meaningful existence of an individual spirit. Basically, it made no sense for memories to be retained after death without a brain; no "seeing" without physical eyes to respond to light; no thought without a brain; no communication without a physical medium to produce and transmit language; etc. Once that no longer made sense, the rest quickly fell apart as well.

I recently read a paper arguing that our experience of a present conscience actually occurs about half of a second after the fact. Basically, the "now" that I experience is a form of early memory as my brain creates a narrative to make sense of my experiences that it can then channel into my short-term memory. Makes sense. 

[Nofear]

33 minutes ago, Analytics said:

One of the most impressive properties of the Core Theory of the physics underlying everyday life is its rigidity. We specify a particular physical situation, such as a configuration of atoms and ions in a neuron in your brain, and the theory predicts with magnificent accuracy how that situation will evolve. At the microscopic scale, quantum mechanics implies that individual measurement outcomes are expressed in probabilities rather than certainties, but those probabilities are unambiguously fixed by the theory, and when we aggregate many particles the overall behavior becomes fantastically predictable (at least in principle, to a Laplace’s Demon–level intellect). There are no vague or unspecified pieces waiting to be filled in; the equations predict how matter and energy behave in any given situation, whether it’s the Earth revolving around the sun, or electrochemical impulses cascading through your central nervous system.

Sounds very reminiscent of Albert Michelson's famous quote. Well, actually it's a famous attribution to Lord Kelvin who paraphrased the quote.

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While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. --Albert Michelson

Gosh... we've gone well beyond the 6th decimal place.

[ZealouslyStriving]

This is why warnings such as this to Timothy exist:

"20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, turn away from profane voices and vain things and arguments in the vain name of science." (1 Timothy 6:20 (Jubilee 2000))

[Nofear]

3 minutes ago, the narrator said:

I recently read a paper arguing that our experience of a present conscience actually occurs about half of a second after the fact. Basically, the "now" that I experience is a form of early memory as my brain creates a narrative to make sense of my experiences that it can then channel into my short-term memory. Makes sense. 

I recommend that you should dismiss Libet's experiment as being part of the corpus that informs your position. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, Nofear said:

Sounds very reminiscent of Albert Michelson's famous quote. Well, actually it's a famous attribution to Lord Kelvin who paraphrased the quote.

Gosh... we've gone well beyond the 6th decimal place.

Sean Carroll provides other similar quotes. In context:

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The magician and skeptic James Randi has offered a million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate [psychic] abilities under controlled conditions; many have tried to claim the prize, but to date no one has succeeded.

And nobody ever will succeed. Psychic powers—defined as mental abilities that allow a person to observe or manipulate the world in ways other than through ordinary physical means—don’t exist. We can say that with confidence, even without digging into any controversies about this or that academic study. The reason is simple: what we know about the laws of physics is sufficient to rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.

That’s a very stron claim. And more than a little bit dangerous: the trash heap of history is populated by scientists claiming to know more than they really do, or predicting that they will know almost everything any day now:

• “[We are] probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.” —Simon Newcomb, 1888
• “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered.” —Albert Michelson, 1894
• “Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months.” —Max Born, 1927
• There is a 50 percent chance that “we would find a complete unified theory of everything by the end of the century.” —Stephen Hawking, 1980

My claim is different. (That’s what everyone says, of course—but this time it really is.) I’m not claiming that we know everything, or anywhere close to it. I’m claiming that we know some things, and that those things are enough to rule out some other things—including bending spoons with the power of your mind. The reason we can say that with confidence relies heavily on the specific form that the laws of physics take. Modern physics not only tells us that certain things are true; it comes with a built-in way of delineating the limits of that knowledge—where our theories cease to be reliable.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 154-155). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

Edited May 3, 2024 by Analytics

[Nofear]

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Sean Carroll provides other similar quotes. In context:

 

Good to know. Thanks. Sean Carroll is a very good cosmologist and I have quite appreciated his insights.

[the narrator]

35 minutes ago, Nofear said:

I recommend that you should dismiss Libet's experiment as being part of the corpus that informs your position. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/

Libet's experiment may have had some issues, but it's not as strong as proponent of free-will have been shouting. The bigger issue was Libet's assumptions about conscious decision making. As the article you share notes:

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A further, more subtle, issue has been suggested by psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. Libet's experiment seems to assume that the act of volition consists of clear-cut decisions, made by a conscious, rational mind. But McGilchrist points out that decisions are often made in a more fuzzy, ambiguous way. They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clear conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.

As McGilchrist puts it, Libet’s apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me.'" Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)? You might sense this if, while trying Libet’s experiment, you find your wrist just seeming to move of its own accord. You feel that you have somehow made the decision, even if not wholly consciously. 

The article I had in mind discusses this and much more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9708083/

My own rejection of free will does not come from any materialism or neuroscientific finding, however. Instead it comes from the very notion of what it means to will or choose something. Whether conscious or unconscious, to will or choose something is to apply my current state "S" (a chaotic blend of physiology, memory, emotions, etc) and current environment "E" (a chaotic blend of weather, culture, atmosphere, etc)  to a set of circumstances "C" that involve multiple theoretical outcomes. If applying to S and E to C could actually and possibly result in different outcomes (let's call them "A" and "B"), then there must be some reason for why A was chosen over B (or vice versa). Proponents of free will generally want to shout out and demand that this reason is free will, but that rejects the very notion of what it means to choose something. If S and E applied to C can result in undetermined results, then the issue is not a matter of free-will versus determinism, but rather one of randomness verses determinism. Free will is simply a nonsensical fantasy and a contradiction in terms. 

[Nofear]

2 minutes ago, the narrator said:

Libet's experiment may have had some issues, but it's not as strong as proponent of free-will have been shouting. The bigger issue was Libet's assumptions about conscious decision making. As the article you share notes:

The article I had in mind discusses this and much more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9708083/

My own rejection of free will does not come from any materialism or neuroscientific finding, however. Instead it comes from the very notion of what it means to will or choose something. Whether conscious or unconscious, to will or choose something is to apply my current state "S" (a chaotic blend of physiology, memory, emotions, etc) and current environment "E" (a chaotic blend of weather, culture, atmosphere, etc)  to a set of circumstances "C" that involve multiple theoretical outcomes. If applying to S and E to C could actually and possibly result in different outcomes (let's call them "A" and "B"), then there must be some reason for why A was chosen over B (or vice versa). Proponents of free will generally want to shout out and demand that this reason is free will, but that rejects the very notion of what it means to choose something. If S and E applied to C can result in undetermined results, then the issue is not a matter of free-will versus determinism, but rather one of randomness verses determinism. Free will is simply a nonsensical fantasy and a contradiction in terms. 

Agreed, rejecting Libet's experiment does not mean free will must exist. Heck, rejecting determinism doesn't even mean one has to believe in free will (they are "hard indeterminists", as opposed to "hard determinists"). But one can believe in determinism and still believe in free will. See for example: https://publicsquaremag.org/dialogue/consciousness-isnt-real-an-interview-with-tarik-lacour/

I'm personally not a compatibilist, but rather a libertarian (here philosophy of free will, not politics). Nonetheless, the point remains. Whatever camp one chooses, Libet need not enter the discussion.

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, Nofear said:

One way of reading your thread is to understand you as saying that you think it should challenge my theology. I can explain my position in more clarity later. In the meantime, I'll leave it to you try to understand the position of the opposite side of the argument.

What I’ve stated here, including the level of confidence in the nonexistence of spirits and psychic powers, is my best understanding of the current state of science. Multiple approaches to looking at reality (i.e. physics, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology) all converge on the same place, just as the theory of evolution surprisingly proves that the sun must generate its power from something other than non-nuclear combustion. That type of convergence is powerful. 

Having said that, in terms of ethics and human wellbeing, some theistic belief structures are better than some non-theistic belief structures. It reminds me of my great-grandfather, who was an intellectual giant and an atheist. When my grandmother joined a religion, she visited her father to share the news (when I imagine this, I always picture him sitting in his den, reading Nietzsche in the original German). My grandmother told him that she was joining a religion. He looked up from his book and said, “Oh really. Which one?” She said she was becoming a Quaker. He sighed and said, ‘Well, you could have done worse.” And when I look at that branch of my family tree, my Quaker grandmother was a better human being than my atheist great-grand father. 

Believing in your religion doesn’t bug me. What does bug me, however, is when certain people cherry pick what science they are going to embrace and what science they are going to ignore, embrace cultural wars, willfully misrepresent their opponents with ridiculous strawmen, and then belittle those strawmen by saying they are denying biological reality.

Personally, I don’t care whether somebody denies biological reality or not. But hypocrisy bugs me.

Edited May 3, 2024 by Analytics

[teddyaware]

1 hour ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

This is why warnings such as this to Timothy exist:

"20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, turn away from profane voices and vain things and arguments in the vain name of science." (1 Timothy 6:20 (Jubilee 2000))

It’s hard to imagine that in a universe filled with so many baffling mysteries that the scientific method is presently unable to fathom, let alone answer, that anyone could have the hubris to imagine the world of science, at its present state of sophistication and attainment, is somehow able to provided definitive answers to all of the ultimate questions of existence! It’s going to be most interesting to see the expressions on the God denying atheists’ faces when they pass through the portal of death and realize they’re still fully conscious. But I think it’s also possible that most of them won’t be all that surprised because the continuance of consciousness after the death of the body will seem very natural to them, in spite of the fact that while in the flesh they were cocksure consciousness ends at death. But perhaps the most common reaction of all the newly deceased atheistic former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will be ‘why in the world did I trust in the arm of flesh?!” 

Edited May 3, 2024 by teddyaware

[the narrator]

25 minutes ago, Nofear said:

I'm personally not a compatibilist, but rather a libertarian (here philosophy of free will, not politics).

So what does "free will" mean to you? Or, rather, what does it mean to choose something (or, how does one choose)?

[Analytics]

18 minutes ago, teddyaware said:

But perhaps the most common reaction of all the newly deceased atheistic former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will be ‘why in the world did I trust in the arm of flesh?!” 

In this purely hypothetical scenario, my reaction will probably be, “Really? So God is a trixter and set up the world as a game so that those who ignored the evidence in a specific way and embraced a certain set of beliefs that aren’t supported by the evidence are the winners? That’s interesting. And since I chose to think as carefully as I could and follow my sincere beliefs I’m going to a lower realm where I can’t perpetuate this on my spirit children without end? That’s great news! Will Karl Marx be in the realm I’m going to? That’s wonderful! I’d love to leisurely discuss economics with him over a game of chess.

[Nofear]

15 minutes ago, Analytics said:

What I’ve stated here, including the level of confidence in the nonexistence of spirits and psychic powers, is my best understanding of the current state of science. Multiple approaches to looking at reality (i.e. physics, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology) all converge on the same place, just as the theory of evolution surprisingly proves that the sun must generate its power from something other than non-nuclear combustion. That type of convergence is powerful. 

...

Believing in your religion doesn’t bug me. What does bug me, however, is when certain people cherry pick what science they are going to embrace and what science they are going to ignore, embrace cultural wars, willfully misrepresent their opponents with ridiculous strawmen, and then belittle those strawmen by saying they are denying biological reality.

I can respect using science. My theology is very much informed by science. Similarly, for me, I believe my understanding of science is deepened by my theology.

What do I mean? One of the most profound limitations of a science theory is that it cannot observe anything outside of that theory. It can only observe anomalies in the context of the measurands of the theory and not something outside it. I can speak better to cosmology than neurology. The current scientific models have nothing of spirit matter. Consequently, it cannot observe it. Our current cosmological models have no room for spirit matter. Hence, it cannot observe it. There can be anomalies and as we refine our cosmology things could get better or could get worse. As it stands, we have no real idea what ~95% of the universe is made of. That doesn't mean spirit matter must exist. But it also doesn't mean that spirit matter doesn't exist. What my theology suggests is that any model of the universe which excludes something that one might call "spirit matter" must necessarily be incomplete. So, I keep my mind open (~95% open).

In the same vein, I don't think any neurological theory which attempts to explain consciousness which necessarily excludes the concept of the spirit will succeed. Currently, despite vast and incredibly impressive amounts of neurological data (again, awesome!) there is no accepted theory of consciousness. None. For me, that's expected and I'm not surprised---that's confirmation bias for ya. But, being biased doesn't necessarily mean one is wrong just as being paranoid doesn't necessarily mean no one is out to get you.

PS: Can't say this is correct, but it is an intriguing concept. https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/

 

[Nofear]

23 minutes ago, the narrator said:

So what does "free will" mean to you? Or, rather, what does it mean to choose something (or, how does one choose)?

Meh. I'll let this article catch one up on the past few thousand years of divisive and no winning argument yet thoughts on the matter.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

[Calm]

5 hours ago, Analytics said:

What I mean by this is that there isn’t a “ghost in the machine” and that everything we are, including our sense of self, are the result of purely biological processes made of the mundane stuff we are made of

It seems to me logically and scientifically the best you can say is everything we are and experience can be explained without appealing to a spirit. I don’t see how you can prove the absence of one.  Off to swimming so not reading the other posts yet, so maybe I will change my mind.  
 

PS:  thanks for investing the time and effort, always interesting to hear how different people see the world in a more detailed way 

Edited May 3, 2024 by Calm

[CV75]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

On another thread, I stated in passing the title of this thread, and @Calm asked me: "Maybe another thread because I would love to know how we can know this."

 

Part 1: Introduction

I have claimed that science has proven that “spirits” don’t exist. What I mean by this is that there isn’t a “ghost in the machine” and that everything we are, including our sense of self, are the result of purely biological processes made of the mundane stuff we are made of, and that when people have an experience of floating outside of their bodies in NDEs and the like, these experiences are illusions driven by the physical processes of the brain.

I don’t particularly like this belief, and I never wanted to believe it. However, I did want to know the truth. By reading “the best of books”, I’ve found that multiple fields of science all converge on this idea: we are purely biological beings, and there isn’t and can’t be a ghost in the machine.

The predictive power of science does make learning this exciting and satisfying. An excellent example of this is how Charles Darwin predicted that the earth is very old, which prediction flew in the face of conventional wisdom that the earth couldn’t be very old because if it was, the sun would have burnt out by now. But by looking at the time required for evolution and geological processes, Darwin correctly predicted that there had to have been a then-unknown power source to the sun that caused it to be able to burn for at least many hundreds of millions of years, and that prediction turned out to be correct.

An excellent book that goes into this more is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition (pp. 105-108). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

In the following three posts, I’ll provide evidence from three different fields that all point to the same conclusion—there isn’t a ghost in the machine.

 

Great examples, but why do you not like the belief that the human spirit is not real, and why did you never want to believe it?

Biology is real and as such constitutes a spiritual principle (Alma 32: 35, “O then, is not this real?”). It does not operate in a vacuum; I take the integrated fundamental laws of reality, studied through the various recognized branches of knowledge, to be the “ghost(s)” operating in the object or subject at hand. Our semantics and paradigms provide barriers and leverages to the processes that involve knowing what is real. The presence and integration of these laws is not consistent from say, the big bang onward, but as long as they operate, so do the ghosts. Biology is simply preceded and replaced by other ghosts.

I take philosophical or epistemological schools of thought to arise from biological processes.

[Amulek]

48 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Will Karl Marx be in the realm I’m going to? That’s wonderful! I’d love to leisurely discuss economics with him over a game of chess.

Ugh, Marxian economics is a painfully boring exercise in manipulating input-output tables and is pretty much irrelevant. I would stick with just the chess.

[LoudmouthMormon]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Believing in your religion doesn’t bug me. What does bug me, however, is when certain people cherry pick what science they are going to embrace and what science they are going to ignore, embrace cultural wars, willfully misrepresent their opponents with ridiculous strawmen, and then belittle those strawmen by saying they are denying biological reality.

That's fair.  I used to get bugged by ignorant people claiming stuff in their ignorance, and refusing to allow things into their entrenched, thick skulls that might force a little critical thought.  I've since accepted that I'll be around such folks forever, and I occasionally am such folks, so it doesn't bug me any more.  I prioritize the energy I spend interacting with them.  These days, when my wife calls me to some task, I'll call back "Just a minute - someone is being wrong on the internet!" It's a fun recurring joke in our house. It's better to not get bugged by people.  I'm not going to tell you your business, but when I stopped being emotionally impacted by fools, my life got an awful lot lighter and happier.  I recommend it to everyone.

Anyway, a response:

You and some of your sources claim "knowledge", and you give the title "proof" to your 4 arguments.  I call hogwash.  It's been 25 years since my "Symbolic logic" and "Fact, Belief, Truth, and Knowledge" classes in college, but I was given different definitions for your two words in the happy secular philosophy department of the University of Utah.  You can't know something if you might be wrong.  And proof compels the mind to accept something as true.  I don't think ya got either.  What you have is evidence, perhaps strong evidence, possibly conclusive evidence.  But you're lacking proof, and neither you nor your sources reach knowledge.  I've seen the exact same certainty, for decades, by smart and sometimes even credentialled people about stuff like precolombian horses, massive undiscovered mesoamerican civilizations, and the lack of "Jewish DNA" in Native American populations.  All 3 criticisms are about 98% dead in the water, out argued by advancing human knowledge and understanding in the sciences they called upon to voice their lofty pronouncements. 

For your claims of proof and knowledge: "Absence of evidence isn't proof of absence."  I understood this when I was 20.  It would be nice if more folks understood that. (That quote is an example of what knowledge looks like, btw.)

 

Your questions:

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

Something like 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. If, say, homo erectus had a homo-erectus spirit, what happened when homo erectus went extinct? Was that timed to transpire when the limited supply of homo erectus spirits was exhausted?

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

If there was one spirit driving things, why does splitting a brain result in two distinct personalities, each with its own unique sense of self?

Dunno.  And neither do you.  I mean, good questions, but these are questions we can only speculate about.  They are not proof.  Unanswered questions are not knowledge.  Behold - I am not compelled to admit the lack of a soul by your questions. 

 

Quoted questions posed by your sources: 

Quote

Were there then two selves? Were there also two free wills? Why aren’t the two halves of the brain conflicting over which half is in charge? Is one half in charge? Were the two selves of the brain trapped in a body that could only be at one place at one time? Which half decided where the body would be? WHY WHY WHY was there this apparent feeling of unity? Was consciousness and the sense of self actually located in one half of the brain?

Same answer: Dunno, and neither do you and your sources.   I'd add Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities), and the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics (where voices tell them to do things) to the pile.

 

Quote

How should we modify the Core Theory equation (shown in the Appendix) to allow for the soul to influence the particles in our body? It’s a substantial hurdle to leap.

Just pointing out that Caroll is looking at a "theory", and you're packaging it as "proof" and "knowledge".  Dude refutes you himself when he says "To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way that we haven’t yet detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed."  

Again, you've got a strong argument, you've got lots of good evidence.  You ain't got knowledge.  You ain't got compelling proof.  

 

Quote

There needs to be a way that “soul stuff” interacts with the fields of which we are made—with electrons, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge? Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated? Is there “virtual soul stuff” as well as “real soul stuff,” and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles? Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes? Is the soul a kind of “hidden variable” playing an important role in quantum ontology?

I don't understand quantum stuff enough to speak intelligently on the topic, but it still remains quite easy to respond with "dunno.  It's a poser all right, but you can't jump from your questions to claims of conclusive proof and knowledge."

Sort of related, I once heard an argument from an atheist intellectual, quite smart.  Like you, data driven, bugged by dogma and dogmatics.  He was working on the new cultural winds of preferred pronouns and gender theory, and advanced an argument in support of such things that inadvertently argued for the existence of a soul.  He mentioned the emerging science of quantum entanglement, where particles seemed to influence each other in ways we don't understand, sometimes faster than the speed of light, which we also don't understand.  He pointed to the existing scientific research (in pretty early stages), suggesting that there might be some sort of quantum entanglement effects between two human brains, which might be part of the reason we form attachments and have love.  Possible explanations for the feelings of being intertwined, knowing what the other is thinking, finishing each other's sentences, etc.   My contribution to that line of speculation is to point out that particles remain after death, and might remain entangled after death.   So yeah, the next time I see Sean Carrol, I'll mention it to him and see if it might help him answer his questions.

 

I suppose to conclude, I find such things fascinating.  How our brains work, where we get our sense of self, how a single cell grows into an entire person.  I get why folks look at all the stuff we're learning about the topic, and end up concluding "This finally shuts down all the backwards superstition about souls and god and all that."  But what they're really doing, is finding reason to believe stuff about reality that conflicts with other religious beliefs about reality.  

Don't be claiming knowledge until you've got some.  Your proofs may be strong and persuasive, but they aren't compelling. 

[Tacenda]

Oh so what about those that know what goes on near the operating table when they die and come back. Huh??

 Half kidding, there are some really compelling NDE's about this. Also, when my mom and MIL, passed, the hospice or caretaker have said that they are in between earth and heavenward. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLMHf5SLOP4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0S_VukXBog

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/hospice-nurse-explains-phenomena-that-happen-when-a-person-is-days-away-from-dying/5V2KLXIBRBEWNDGO2O6IPVNQOA/#:~:text=Part of experiencing visioning is,sees someone from the past.

[OGHoosier]

As usual, @Analytics, your posts inspire a fruitful sharpening of concepts. I'm gonna quote a lot of articles, with emphasis, all of which is mine.

I'm not as confident that Gazzaniga's evidence shows what he claims it to show. Gazzaniga claims that the halves of the brain, when split by commissurotomy, form two conscious entities with separate senses of self. This is derived from experimental findings like those described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Unity of Consciousness: 

Quote

In normal life, patients show little effect of the operation. In particular, their consciousness of their world and themselves appears to remain as unified as it was prior to the operation. How this can be has puzzled a lot of people (Hurley 1998). Even more interesting for our purposes, however, is that, under certain laboratory conditions, these patients seem to behave as though two ‘centres of consciousness’ have been created in them. The original unity seems to be gone and two centres of unified consciousness seem to have replaced it, each associated with one of the two cerebral hemispheres.

Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of behaviour that prompt that assessment. The human retina is split vertically in such a way that the left half of each retina is primarily hooked up to the left hemisphere of the brain and the right half of each retina is primarily hooked up to the right hemisphere of the brain. Now suppose that we flash the word TAXABLE on a screen in front of a brain bisected patient in such a way that the letters TAX hit the left side of the retina, the letters ABLE the right side, and we put measures in place to ensure that the information hitting each half of the retina goes only to one lobe and is not fed to the other. If such a patient is asked what word is being shown, the mouth, controlled usually by the left hemisphere, will say TAX while the hand controlled by the hemisphere that does not control the mouth (usually the left hand and the right hemisphere) will write ABLE. Or, if the hemisphere that controls a hand (usually the left hand) but not speech is asked to do arithmetic in a way that does not penetrate to the hemisphere that controls speech and the hands are shielded from the eyes, the mouth will insist that it is not doing arithmetic, has not even thought of arithmetic today, and so on—while the appropriate hand is busily doing arithmetic!

The article continues: 

Quote

Recently, this standard assessment has been challenged. In his important 2010 book and other publications, Tim Bayne suggests that there are not two centres of consciousness. There is just one. What explains the appearance of duality is that this single centre of consciousness switches in the material of which it is consciousness from one hemisphere to the other. He calls this the switch model (2010: chs 8.4 and 9.5). To so much as get this approach off the ground, it is crucial that that there be little or no evidence of a centre of consciousness that is conscious of, say, A, B, and C but not D, E, and F and at the same time of a centre of consciousness that is conscious of D, E, and F but not A, B, C. What we just called the standard assessment starts from a belief that there is lots of such evidence. Bayne disagrees. We will return to Bayne’s view in Section 4.2.

Section 4.2's coverage of Bayne's theory:

Quote

As we saw, Bayne and Chalmers (2003) and Bayne (2010: ch. 9) urge that while access unity is split in these patients, phenomenal unity need not be. Why not? Because there may be no duality of unified consciousness at any given time. Rather, a single instance of unified consciousness may be switching back and forth between the material in the two hemispheres. As Schechter (2012) has urged, evidence of a simultaneous duality of consciousness would be a major problem for this approach. We will not attempt to assess the relevant evidence here (see Brook 2015 for further discussion). Even if Bayne is right, that should not affect the prospects of a unified account of disorders of unified consciousness—what is going on in brain bisection cases would not be a disorder of unified consciousness!

I have not been able to acquire a copy of Brooks 2015 within my price range (academic monographs are prohibitively expensive for me rn) but I will try. In the meantime, Bayne has written elsewhere on the evidential basis for his theory. From a Scholarpedia article which he curates:

Quote

Many theorists endorse the two-streams model of the split-brain, according to which split-brain patients have two streams of consciousness, one in each hemisphere (e.g. Sperry 1984). It is this duality of consciousness which is thought to explain: (i) why the patient appears to have a conscious representation of ‘key’ and ‘ring’ but no representation of ‘key-ring’; and (ii) why the patient’s representation of ‘key’ and ‘ring’ are available to different consuming systems. Two-streams accounts of the split-brain are well-equipped to explain the behavioural disunity that patients exhibit in laboratory conditions, but they struggle to account for the unity that split-brain patients exhibit in everyday situations. Some two-stream theorists attempt to explain this unity by adopting the duplication gambit, according to which the split-brain patient has behavioural integrity because their two streams of consciousness have the same contents (Davis 1997; Moor 1982). Other two-streamers hold that the patient’s stream of consciousness is normally unified and divides into two only in laboratory conditions (Marks 1981; Tye 2003).

Another model of the split-brain holds that such patients have a fragmented stream of consciousness, in that they have triples of conscious states (e1, e2 and e3) such that e1 and e2 are both co-conscious with e3 but not with each other (Lockwood 1989). This model attempts to account for both the unity and disunity exhibited by split-brain patients. However, as we noted above, it is controversial whether consciousness can fragment in this way. [OGHoosier's note: if e3 exists, then it isn't associated with either hemisphere. Could belong to the brainstem, could belong to the gut nervous complex, could belong to an immaterial soul, but the existence of an e3 seems like a convenient connection point for the spirit if e3 does indeed exist.)

A third model of the split-brain holds that consciousness in the split-brain switches between hemispheres (Bayne 2008). A central line of evidence for this approach derives from research conducted by Levy (1977) and Trevarthen (1974) involving chimeric stimuli (that is, similar stimuli joined at the vertical mid-line). Since each hemisphere receive information about a different stimulus one would expect the subject to produce conflicting responses if both left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere representations were conscious, but no such conflict was observed. Patients gave one response on the vast majority of competitive trials, and the non-responding hemisphere gave no evidence that it had any perception at all. In light of these findings, one might suppose that consciousness in the split-brain ‘switches’ between hemispheres, and that at any one time the split-brain patient has but a single stream of consciousness. If this model is correct, then perhaps consciousness is always unified, even in those human beings in whom the corpus callosum has been severed.

If Gazzaniga remarks on chimeric stimuli, I would be pleased to know it. As I do not own a copy of Gazzaniga's work and will not be able to get to my university library for the next few days, I shall have to depend on you to provide such a reference if it so exists. 

For my part, I think split-brain research validates an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) approach to the mind in which perception and locomotion are material capacities, whereas abstract intellection is not. There clearly are not two competing wills or intellects in the heads of commisurotomy patients, the only differences of which I am aware are seen in cases of perception and simple locomotion. A-T thus incorporates split-brain findings with basic human intuition and philosophical observations regarding intentionality, qualia, and experiences of extra-corporeal consciousness. If A-T is right, then the writing hemisphere need not have conscious experience at all to display the effects observed by Sperry. 

This has finally spurred me to get off my butt and send to Baylor for a dissertation I've been meaning to read, Brandon Rickabaugh's The Conscious Mind Unified (2020). Should be an interesting and recent revisiting of the issue. When I can get through the digital copy I will send notes.