Tweet
I am on my 3rd round of chemo and each round makes concentration harder and harder. I probably won't respond to anything, but I have been thinking a lot about the future and being the philosophical guy I am, well, I came up with this.
Denying Self-Consciousness, Quantum and a Christian answer to the Problem of Evil by Glenn Morton
I like a long list of philosophers, believe that the thing we call self-consciousness is our soul--it is something above and different from the universe. It doesn't arise from the universe but the universe may in part arise from it, at least that is what science seems to say see below.
During Christmas, my sons and I discussed self-consciousness. One son tried to say that he could doubt that self-consciousness existed. I and my other two sons jumped quickly on him noting that to do so is to exhibit insanity. Why did we accuse my beloved son of insanity at that moment? First and foremost, WHAT is doing the denying? How can something that is not conscious deny anything? Secondly denying my self-consciousness is self referential. It is making a statement about the lack of existence of the self same entity that makes the statement that it doesn't exist. One has to be conscious to make a statement, and one has to have self consciousness to know that there is a consciousness in myself which needs denying. So the fact that you deny you have self-consciousness requires that you have self-consciousness. And third, one can deny the existence of the rainbow, calling it an illusion and live just fine. One cannot deny self-consciousness and live well. If one were to really try to act as if they were not self-conscious, one would have to ignore pain, hunger, thirst and life would be very short indeed. Rocks don't have self-consciousness but then neither do they eat, drink, talk or form clubs for the denial of self-consciousness.
Some might bring up Cotard's syndrome in which people claim they feel as if they don't exist. Again logically, what is it that is conveying this particular piece of information? It is the consciousness that they possess that is denying that their consciousness exists. Logically that is in conflict with the observational data that some consciousness is denying itself consciousness.
I would add one other aspect of this problem. Without self-consciousness, science is impossible. In any experiment one must be aware of where the self is in relationship to the experimental equipment. One must be self-conscious to report the results after writing a paper for publication with one's name on it. More importantly, one must have self-consciousness and free will to do science. If every event is predetermined, then so are the states of consciousness predetermined. It is those states of consciousness which observe the experimental apparatus and report on what it does. This produces a conflict, if the states of consciousness are predetermined, did it really see the experiment or did it merely experience a set of predetermined experiences that signify nothing? As Rothman and Sudarshan say:
One aspect of self-consciousness is intentionality, The Will to do something.
It seems rather difficult to deny intentionality is a part of self consciousness. One would get laughed at for denying that one has the intention to walk to the bathroom, that this intention is just an illusion and not real. Without intentionality of the self-conscious entity nothing we do gets done.
Gen 1:26 says:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth
An interesting question to me is whether or not intentionality is what this verse is speaking of. I had an experience in which my will overrode what biochemistry said should have occurred. This, in turn, implies that Intentionality can affect the physical events in the world. I once had surgery on the nerve at my elbow. I had cubital tunnel syndrome which basically means I was sawing my nerve in half at my elbow when I bent my right arm. As I lay on the surgical table awaiting the anesthesia, they told me that they were going to inject this stuff into my hand where the IV was, and that I would feel it crawling up my arm. They wanted me to count backwards from 100 to 90. They told me that no one made it past 95 and that by the time it got to my shoulder, it would quickly put me out. I told them that I would count backwards in Mandarin Chinese and make it to 90. So here is what happened.
I felt the anesthesia start up my arm. I began counting. 100, 99... I heard some European resident ask what I was doing. A Chinese guy in the OR said, "He is counting in Chinese." When I hit 95, the creepy crawlys in my arm had reached my shoulder and this massive wave of fatigue and sleepiness came over me. I forced myself to stay awake and keep counting, 94 (Jiu shi si), 93(Jiu shi san), 92(Jiu shi er), 91(Jiu shi yi), 90 (Jiu shi). I then said, "There, I did it. Goodnight" and went to sleep. I will fully admit that staying awake those last 5 numbers was extremely difficult, but clearly not impossible.
The doctor later told me he had never seen anyone make it to 90 and that he had depended on the Chinese guy to tell him that I had indeed made it. My coworker the next day, upon hearing this, said, "Glenn, you don't have to fight against EVERYTHING." lol. But here is the point, my will overrode what mechanism would predict.
So how did my intentionality override what biochemistry said should happen? Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon, was one of the first to illustrate that intentionality is different than physics.
Penfield's patients knew they didn't move their arms. It wasn't an intentional act, so merely engaging the circuitry didn't engage the consciousness. My self-conscious intentionality over-rode what determinism would seem to require. Because of this, I do not believe that self-consciousness is truly a deterministic phenomenon. Indeed, as shown above, if self-consciousness is determined, then experimental science is not truly experimental and nothing is actually learned.
Several things point to us being more than just a material thing.
Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner wrote a book in which they show that every single interpretation of Quantum Mechanics requires an external observer. In QM the observer plays an essential role. If nature is deterministic and meaningless, how is it that physics places an observer in a prime position?
According to Bell, it is consciousness that forces local acausality, which raises questions. Are humans a physical acausal agent? Do we humans collectively or individually create the world we live in?
It is clear that we need something beyond physics, beyond the equations of quantum to collapse the wave function, but doing so means that this mental thing, this observer, creates the world he lives in. All of us, in some sense are creating the world we live in, and maybe it is that collectively we humans are responsible for the world's good and ill.
With this view is it unreasonable to have prayers from conscious beings affect the world? Can three people change reality? (For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" Matt 18:20)
This was my personal experience, like that of Jane Arroway in Contact. It became a peg-point that I could not get around as I struggled with whether God existed during my 40s and early 50s. It is like today going into your local grocery store with 3 friends and asking for a speaker of Aleut to be at checkout line 5 in 10 minutes. And ask for it publically, 3 hours after being told that you SHOULD ask for such things!
If it is the case that we collectively choose the world we live in, then this creates an incredible answer to the problem of evil so many atheists use to kill God off. They say, "Why would a loving God allow....[fill in your disaster of preference]" and with that, God is off to the dustbin of history.
But if mankind collectively as observers are responsible for choosing the world we live in, then it isn't God who sent that tornado or earthquake but us, collectively.
Now, my middle son thought the above sounded deistic. It might if one doesn't realize that Luke 4: 5-8 seems to indicate that it isn't God who is in control of the world, at least as of His time.
5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.
8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve
Note that Jesus didn't contradict him and say that No, you don't have authority to make the offer. Which at least as far as Christian theology is concerned might mean that the Fall transferred authority from God to Satan and to Fallen mankind. And while Matt 29:18 says that all authority has been given to Christ, there is no indication that he has exercised all that authority yet. Even in a corporation, one can have authority but not exercise it. Why might that be? It may be because of a wider view of which we are unaware. My bosses did some strange things in my company and when I got to that level, I began to understand why--the wider view doesn't always appear to the person in the trenches.
One more thing. When I was 25 my older brother, an eagle scout, Sr. high school class president (after 1 year in the town), president of his pledge class, a good athlete (none of which I was) who looked like Robert Redford, died. He was 29 and left a wife with two children, one barely born and had a one year old dental practice in Nebraska. I saw no good in that event at all ----until many years later when my former sister-in-law came to visit. She had not been a Christian at the time of Gary's death. Gary had wanted her to be one. When he died, she was naturally mad at God and stayed that way for years. But because of Gary's witness during the 4 months between diagnosis and death, she eventually became a Christian. That is what she told me. She met a wonderful man who adopted my niece and nephew and was a great father to them. My niece and nephew also eventually became Christians. Being 25, I saw how short life could be and started trying to achieve things, I worked harder at all I did, and eventually rose in the ranks of an oil company. And when, in 2003, I was diagnosed with the cancer that may (or may not) take me in a couple of years, I spent a month in a deep depression. I had been told I wouldn't make 5 years. I was 53 yrs old. I considered retiring early--giving up. But I thought of Gary, who was everything I wanted to be as a kid, and thought, what do I have to gripe about? I saw my kids grow up. He didn't. I decided then that I would chose to live my life happily with as much gusto as I could. Since then, I have lived in China, learned Mandarin badly, started 4 companies, all successful. And I look back on Gary's death with new perspective. I couldn't see the broader picture when I was 25. I think I see some of it today.
Denying Self-Consciousness, Quantum and a Christian answer to the Problem of Evil by Glenn Morton
I like a long list of philosophers, believe that the thing we call self-consciousness is our soul--it is something above and different from the universe. It doesn't arise from the universe but the universe may in part arise from it, at least that is what science seems to say see below.
During Christmas, my sons and I discussed self-consciousness. One son tried to say that he could doubt that self-consciousness existed. I and my other two sons jumped quickly on him noting that to do so is to exhibit insanity. Why did we accuse my beloved son of insanity at that moment? First and foremost, WHAT is doing the denying? How can something that is not conscious deny anything? Secondly denying my self-consciousness is self referential. It is making a statement about the lack of existence of the self same entity that makes the statement that it doesn't exist. One has to be conscious to make a statement, and one has to have self consciousness to know that there is a consciousness in myself which needs denying. So the fact that you deny you have self-consciousness requires that you have self-consciousness. And third, one can deny the existence of the rainbow, calling it an illusion and live just fine. One cannot deny self-consciousness and live well. If one were to really try to act as if they were not self-conscious, one would have to ignore pain, hunger, thirst and life would be very short indeed. Rocks don't have self-consciousness but then neither do they eat, drink, talk or form clubs for the denial of self-consciousness.
Some might bring up Cotard's syndrome in which people claim they feel as if they don't exist. Again logically, what is it that is conveying this particular piece of information? It is the consciousness that they possess that is denying that their consciousness exists. Logically that is in conflict with the observational data that some consciousness is denying itself consciousness.
I would add one other aspect of this problem. Without self-consciousness, science is impossible. In any experiment one must be aware of where the self is in relationship to the experimental equipment. One must be self-conscious to report the results after writing a paper for publication with one's name on it. More importantly, one must have self-consciousness and free will to do science. If every event is predetermined, then so are the states of consciousness predetermined. It is those states of consciousness which observe the experimental apparatus and report on what it does. This produces a conflict, if the states of consciousness are predetermined, did it really see the experiment or did it merely experience a set of predetermined experiences that signify nothing? As Rothman and Sudarshan say:
One aspect of self-consciousness is intentionality, The Will to do something.
It seems rather difficult to deny intentionality is a part of self consciousness. One would get laughed at for denying that one has the intention to walk to the bathroom, that this intention is just an illusion and not real. Without intentionality of the self-conscious entity nothing we do gets done.
Gen 1:26 says:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth
An interesting question to me is whether or not intentionality is what this verse is speaking of. I had an experience in which my will overrode what biochemistry said should have occurred. This, in turn, implies that Intentionality can affect the physical events in the world. I once had surgery on the nerve at my elbow. I had cubital tunnel syndrome which basically means I was sawing my nerve in half at my elbow when I bent my right arm. As I lay on the surgical table awaiting the anesthesia, they told me that they were going to inject this stuff into my hand where the IV was, and that I would feel it crawling up my arm. They wanted me to count backwards from 100 to 90. They told me that no one made it past 95 and that by the time it got to my shoulder, it would quickly put me out. I told them that I would count backwards in Mandarin Chinese and make it to 90. So here is what happened.
I felt the anesthesia start up my arm. I began counting. 100, 99... I heard some European resident ask what I was doing. A Chinese guy in the OR said, "He is counting in Chinese." When I hit 95, the creepy crawlys in my arm had reached my shoulder and this massive wave of fatigue and sleepiness came over me. I forced myself to stay awake and keep counting, 94 (Jiu shi si), 93(Jiu shi san), 92(Jiu shi er), 91(Jiu shi yi), 90 (Jiu shi). I then said, "There, I did it. Goodnight" and went to sleep. I will fully admit that staying awake those last 5 numbers was extremely difficult, but clearly not impossible.
The doctor later told me he had never seen anyone make it to 90 and that he had depended on the Chinese guy to tell him that I had indeed made it. My coworker the next day, upon hearing this, said, "Glenn, you don't have to fight against EVERYTHING." lol. But here is the point, my will overrode what mechanism would predict.
So how did my intentionality override what biochemistry said should happen? Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon, was one of the first to illustrate that intentionality is different than physics.
Penfield's patients knew they didn't move their arms. It wasn't an intentional act, so merely engaging the circuitry didn't engage the consciousness. My self-conscious intentionality over-rode what determinism would seem to require. Because of this, I do not believe that self-consciousness is truly a deterministic phenomenon. Indeed, as shown above, if self-consciousness is determined, then experimental science is not truly experimental and nothing is actually learned.
Several things point to us being more than just a material thing.
Originally posted by Karl Sabbagh, The Riemann Hypothesis, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 258
Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner wrote a book in which they show that every single interpretation of Quantum Mechanics requires an external observer. In QM the observer plays an essential role. If nature is deterministic and meaningless, how is it that physics places an observer in a prime position?
Originally posted by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 174
Originally posted by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 195
It is clear that we need something beyond physics, beyond the equations of quantum to collapse the wave function, but doing so means that this mental thing, this observer, creates the world he lives in. All of us, in some sense are creating the world we live in, and maybe it is that collectively we humans are responsible for the world's good and ill.
With this view is it unreasonable to have prayers from conscious beings affect the world? Can three people change reality? (For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" Matt 18:20)
Originally posted by Glenn R. Morton, an old email
If it is the case that we collectively choose the world we live in, then this creates an incredible answer to the problem of evil so many atheists use to kill God off. They say, "Why would a loving God allow....[fill in your disaster of preference]" and with that, God is off to the dustbin of history.
But if mankind collectively as observers are responsible for choosing the world we live in, then it isn't God who sent that tornado or earthquake but us, collectively.
Now, my middle son thought the above sounded deistic. It might if one doesn't realize that Luke 4: 5-8 seems to indicate that it isn't God who is in control of the world, at least as of His time.
5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.
8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve
Note that Jesus didn't contradict him and say that No, you don't have authority to make the offer. Which at least as far as Christian theology is concerned might mean that the Fall transferred authority from God to Satan and to Fallen mankind. And while Matt 29:18 says that all authority has been given to Christ, there is no indication that he has exercised all that authority yet. Even in a corporation, one can have authority but not exercise it. Why might that be? It may be because of a wider view of which we are unaware. My bosses did some strange things in my company and when I got to that level, I began to understand why--the wider view doesn't always appear to the person in the trenches.
One more thing. When I was 25 my older brother, an eagle scout, Sr. high school class president (after 1 year in the town), president of his pledge class, a good athlete (none of which I was) who looked like Robert Redford, died. He was 29 and left a wife with two children, one barely born and had a one year old dental practice in Nebraska. I saw no good in that event at all ----until many years later when my former sister-in-law came to visit. She had not been a Christian at the time of Gary's death. Gary had wanted her to be one. When he died, she was naturally mad at God and stayed that way for years. But because of Gary's witness during the 4 months between diagnosis and death, she eventually became a Christian. That is what she told me. She met a wonderful man who adopted my niece and nephew and was a great father to them. My niece and nephew also eventually became Christians. Being 25, I saw how short life could be and started trying to achieve things, I worked harder at all I did, and eventually rose in the ranks of an oil company. And when, in 2003, I was diagnosed with the cancer that may (or may not) take me in a couple of years, I spent a month in a deep depression. I had been told I wouldn't make 5 years. I was 53 yrs old. I considered retiring early--giving up. But I thought of Gary, who was everything I wanted to be as a kid, and thought, what do I have to gripe about? I saw my kids grow up. He didn't. I decided then that I would chose to live my life happily with as much gusto as I could. Since then, I have lived in China, learned Mandarin badly, started 4 companies, all successful. And I look back on Gary's death with new perspective. I couldn't see the broader picture when I was 25. I think I see some of it today.
Comment