You can tell that a nerve has been struck in academia when one lame attempt after another is exploding to plug the hemorrhage in the Darwinian dam. Consciousness theory is what I am talking about. Sometimes the best way to verify a theory is to 1) see if it survives critique and 2) examine if there are any viable alternate theories…and there turns out to be a real attempt to do the latter. One scholar gave the same idea I proposed in recent essays the name “dualism” ie we are dual beings. Ironically, he rejected the idea that a spirit entity could be influencing/interacting with the physical for just one poorly articulated reason; he did not know a means to measure the interaction! Since he didn’t know a means, it must not be there!
This reminds me of a recent critique to the new but solidly demonstrated relationship between cosmic rays, solar magnetic cycles and cloud formation – hence – weather! The government paid scientists are in a bit of a tizzy over the fact that it trounces the C02 claim- Their models don’t predict the measured results ….so the measured results have to be wrong…right??? Couldn’t be their models. Nooooo, That would imply they and the Chicken Little's in the media and politics have been spectacularly wrong for a decade or two. Arrogance and pride are very much alive and thriving in science – believe me. Thriving!
Back to Consciousness. So this clever fellow, a physicist by trade, having come to the same conclusion I brought up in my Babbage Calculator essay, that no quantity of mechanistic elements could transcend their own darkness suggested that in the quantum world waves of interactions could create unpredictable patterns – and patterns he advance with a great ah-hahh- that must be thought and awareness. Not the right patterns and you are dead. Huh. So, before, we interconnected the neurons with wires(synapses) and he acknowledges that cannot produce awareness but somehow interconnecting them wirelessly with quantum entangles states does. I’d ask the simple question, Why so? Its just another way to create more complicated interactions with the same mechanistic elements. The fundamental critique I levied, and that speaker acknowledged, is not actually overcome by the sweep of his hand – patterns…
Also not overcome is the plain obvious implication that by his argument you are just a machine with no inherent value. A marvelous machine as he opines, but I remind, just a machine with no inherent value.
Another author advances that self-awareness, thought and consciousness are just our brain functions doing simulation and synthesis. Now for sure that is exactly what our brain does do. It synthesizes sensor inputs and anticipates complex interactions with the world and stores memory and emotion states, but my Dell computer can do that and its for sure dead dark inside as previously proven in that earlier essay. Since those same things, simulation and synthesis, are simply algorithms then that entity doing just that would too be all darkness inside; reacting but not acting, calculating and storing states but with no awareness of the fact that states were being stored.
The only thing that does make sense is that our bodies are tools, not unlike the Avatar movie and that besides matter and energy there is one more element - fundamental and eternal. The Restored Church of Jesus Christ explains it as an eternal property they call, for lack of a better words, "Intelligence or Light of Truth" and that also handily answers another conundrum that had plagued the std Christian posture about creation; ie if God made you then why is He not responsible for the good and the bad? If "intelligence" or "Spark of Life" or as I like to call it "Life force" is an eternal property, like matter and energy, then it starts to make sense for once why God would consider us kin (His children). It all starts to make sense why we would in fact be valuable – inherently valuable – not just a Talkie 2.1 gadget.
