Re: Natural selection gave us souls

*** wrote:

On 11 Aug 2006 06:16:23 GMT, curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:


"VoiceOfReason" <papa_fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

michael.palmer1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

A life in science

After 40 years of studying the problem of consciousness, Nicholas
Humphrey believes it was natural selection that gave us souls. God, he
insists, had nothing to do with it

Well, when Nicholas stops only "believing" it was natural selection,
and starts providing some _evidence_ that it was natural selection,
then I might be interested. Also, I'd be curious to know what evidence
he has collected that indicates that a soul exists.

I believe we have souls, but that's a religious belief unrelated to
science of the physical world. I do not expect we will ever find
evidence for a soul.

I'm jumping into this thread a few weeks late. Sorry...

I've spent endless hours debating these ideas with people in the context of
AI (can you build a conscious machine with a soul etc.) and just wanted to
throw out some ideas.

First, like Geoff, I believe the soul (and the mind) is just a human
invention. I believe we are simple material machines and there is nothing
complex going on here. When we die, we die - it's not different than what
happens when you break (or just turn off) a computer. The only difference
between us and other machines can be completely explained by our physical
make up.

On the question of mind=soul, they are the same thing for the most part.
Some people might like to distinguish some between the two, but for the
most part, it's the same issue.

This is an age old problem in philosophy that has never been answered in a
way that a majority of people can agree with. It's the mind body problem.
It's the issue of whether these are two things, or one thing. And the
issue of what type of "thing" they are if they are two (the dualist view)
or one (the monist view).

Now, most people that support some variation of the dualist view, believe
that it's impossible to find evidence for the mind by studying the
material. In other words, science (which is limited to the material
domain) has no hope of being able to explain the mental domain (the
mind/soul) because it's a totally separate domain. They see someone like
me that takes a monist view that there is only one domain, as being in
denial of the obvious. (see nando/Mohammad posts as a prime example of this
type of belief). And there is really no direct argument against that - if
the spirit/soul/mind exists in a different domain, then why would science
be able to study it? This is what prevents any material argument against
the mind/soul from getting anywhere against people like Mohammad. It's
invalid before it starts by definition.

But, lets assume the world is just a material place like I believe. If
this is true, then why does 90% of the population of humans believe that
the mind, or the soul, exist as something separate from the body? This
belief seems to exist in all cultures. It even exists in most people who
otherwise think they don't believe in a dualist view. This is shown by the
fact they talk about how the mind having a material basis, instead of
talking about the mind BEING material.

So, why do all humans naturally seem to assume there is a soul? This is
something science should be able to answer if the mind and soul is in fact
just material, and not some other domain.

And I have an answer to offer.

It all comes from the fact that humans have the ability to have private
thoughts. This is where the entire problem started. So what are private
thoughts? It is our ability to sense things happening in our "mind", which
no one else can sense. I can talk to myself, and I can sense these words
happening just as clearly, as I can sense my hand moving. I can close my
eyes and visualize past events, and I can sense them happening in my head,
just as easy as I can sense other physical events.

If someone else is standing next to me, and I move my hand, I can sense it,
and they can sense it. They see it move as easy as I see it move. But, if
I talk to myself in my head, I can sense that, but they can't. If they
stick their ear on my head, they cant' sense it. If they stick their ear
on my foot, they can't sense it. Nothing they do can allow them to sense
my thoughts which I have no problem sensing.

Not only that, but, even though I can sense my private thoughts, I can't
"hear" them with my own ears (for the same reason other people can't hear
them with their ears). I can't see anything happening in the mirror, I
can't smell anything happening, I can't feel it happening - but yet somehow
I know it is happening - somehow I can sense it. But how?

And, no matter what private thoughts I make happen in my head, those
private thoughts can't make things happen in the physical world. They
can't cause something to be moved, or cause something to make a sound, or
cause something to make a smell, etc. Or do they?

This is where the "mind" comes from. This is where the separation of
mental, and physical comes from. This is why this belief shows up in all
cultures - it's because all humans have this same power, and this same
sensory separation between our physical senses, and our mental senses.

Now, imagine you lived 5000 years ago and have no clue about anything
physical. How would you explain where these "thoughts" were coming from?
What created them?

When the body does something, it always has some physical effect, so we say
the body is the source of all these physical effects. But what is the
cause of the mental effects? It must not be the body, because when the
body does something, we can always sense it with our normal physical senses
(and people around us can sense it). So it must be something else causing
the mental effects. Lets give this something else a name, lets call it,
"the soul", or "the mind".

And, if we have a soul which is the cause of the mental effects, and we
have these mental effects which are not physical, it's logical for someone

from 5000 years ago to assume that our soul and it's connected mental

effects, could become disconnected from the physical body. Combine that
with a general fear of death and what do you get? A belief in the
afterlife where our soul (aka our private mental events) can continue to
exist, even when the normal physical behavior of our body has stopped
existing.

If you combine these ideas, with other evidence we all have available to us
- like what happens when we sleep and dream - you find more reasons to
understand why people believe in a separation of mental and physical.
There are times, when we are just waking up, that our mind seems to be
disconnected from our body - we seem to be existing in a domain separate

from the physical where we can't feel, or control, our body. So again,

more evidence to support the idea that our soul separates from the body
when we die (we have sensed it happen on a temporary basis almost every
night - and a dead person and a sleeping person sure have a lot in common -
they lay there doing nothing).

So, the question for science then becomes, how is it possible for us to
sense these mental events, that no one else can sense and that we can't
sense happening with our normal eyes and ears? Well, that answer is
trivial for us to answer in this day and age (but impossible a few hundred
years ago). Everything we can sense, happens because of the generation of
neural impulses being sent to the brain. If you stimulate the optic nerve,
we well "see" what we think is light, when there is no light (just turn
your eye and poke the side with your finger to see the effect). But the
brain is already a large network of different devices. So, what we are
"sensing" when we have private thoughts, is nothing but one part of the
brain, "sensing" the activity of another part of the brain. It's just more
sensory hardware at work inside the brain. That's all you need to explain
how it's possible for us to sense our own mental activity - and to explain
why no one standing next to us can sense it.

So, there you have it. A simple material answer to why all cultures
develop this concept of a separation of body and soul aka body and mind aka
a separation of the mental, and the physical. And why people so naturally
latch on to the belief in an afterlife. It's because our brain is built in
a way, that allows us to generate internal mental behaviors which we can
sense as easily as we can sense our hand moving, but which, produces no
effects outside the brain for others to see, or for us to even sense, with
our eyes and ears.

There are complexities I've ignored here. But this I believe is the
foundation of why the human race in general since the beginning of recorded
history, is all fooled into believing in a separation of body and soul,
when in fact there never was a separation. It's because there are physical
things happening in our brain (hidden inside our head), which we are
sensing as our "thoughts" but which we could never sense with our eyes or
our ears - so everyone naturally created a model that put those different
sensations into different domains. The way the brain works, makes them
fall into different domains.

Not only was it an important part of man's religions, but this separation
of domains is deeply imbedded into all our thoughts by our language still
to this day. We are taught it from such a young age it's hard to break
free of. We have the words mind and body we use all the time, as if they
were two different things. We have ideas like material, and immaterial.
We have words like tangible, and intangible which even have legal meanings.
We have software and hardware (as if software exists as something
intangible and nonphysical). It never does - software is always physical.
We just like to talk about it as if it weren't physical because this is how
we are taught to think about everything mental - we are taught that mental
activity is not physical - but that is just a 10,000 year old error made
for obvious reasons that we need to fix in our culture now.

People that say they don't believe in the soul, will still argue with you
that ideas aren't physical (or that math concepts are non physical - like
the idea of "1" or "2"). But if they do that, then they do actually
believe in ghosts - just one they refuse to call a ghost. Almost everyone,
even the strong scientific/material thinkers, are still very confused by
all this because of how we were all taught to think about these things
using our language.

I didn't realize how confused I was about all this until just a few years
ago because I thought ideas and software weren't physical but that this was
not a supernatural concept, but just "normal". Even though I had no belief
in Gods, or spirits, I still thought it was valid to think of an idea as
something non physical. And you see how others struggle with this when
they look for ways to explain how the mind is "created" by the action of
the brain, instead of simply understanding that the mind IS the brain.
It's a complex idea to get your mind around but once you spend enough time
thinking about it, you realize that's just what it is. When we sense our
own thoughts, we are sensing parts of our brain moving. Chemicals in the
brain are physically moving just like when we sense our hand physically
moving. The mind is simply the brain. But to really understand this, you
have to remove all the "ghosts" from our language, which are all hold overs
of this error made by our culture thousands of years ago, and which still
exists in us as a fundamental concept in the language we all use to talk,
and think, with.

When people talk about being conscious, it's the same thing at work. It
just means that we have the ability to generate and sense these internal
events which are separate from the external world. That's the real
foundation that everyone uses to justify their concepts of consciousness.
It's the belief that it "feels like" we are a soul, which is "separate"

from the body, but yet, in control of our body. But again, why does it

"feel" like we are separate? Only because we were taught to think of
ourselves that way by ancestors that had no clue how the body or the brain
worked.

It takes time, but if you learn to think of yourself not as soul, or a
mind, controlling a body, but as a brain, controlling a body, this
"feeling" of being separate, will slowly vanish over time. I do not have a
mind, which I use to control my body, I am a brain, which is controlling a
body. Say that to yourself as many times as as you have used the word
"mind" in the past, and you will start to see the truth. We were all just
brainwashed by our culture into believing a lie.

Did evolution make us conscious and give us a soul and a mind? You bet.
Evolution did it when it created for us a brain that had the ability to
generate these internal signals that were independent of the signals
controlling our external parts. But, these internal signals are under our
control, in the same way the signals to the arms and legs are under our
control (what we call voluntary control). But they have no direct external
effects.

And why would evolution end up producing a brain like this? So that we can
act-out behaviors in our head, and allow the brain to predict what will
result from the behaviors, before we actually did them. We act out the
action of sticking our hand out to touch the flame, and have the brain
respond with a result of "ouch, that hurt" followed by yanking the hand
back followed by a vision of blisters on our hand. All that can happen in
the brain, based on how it was conditioned by past experience, without us
moving our real hand. Having this power is an obvious advantage, but yet,
it's a feature that most animals have very little of (though some birds
seem to have a surprising amounts of it).

If you combine this power to act out in the head, with language behavior
skills, this is where humans show their real power - and where we gain the
power to name the cause of the mental events and in doing so, define us to
be a soul separate from a body, instead of just, a body.

This is a simple way to explain how evolution gave us what humans
mislabeled as a soul, and a mind. Evolution just gave us a brain with the
ability to act out behaviors ahead of time. The rest was just a big
misunderstanding by people that had no clue what we were.

Finding the evidence to support all this, is what further brain research
(and AI research as we continue to try to build conscious machines) has
ahead of it.


What do you say to professionals that have devoted their lives to the
study of the paranormal. Many years ago I read Ian Stevenson, no
radical is he, and found the 20 cases in his book certainly
fascinating. Likewise I can't help but wonder how the collection of
letters from physicians certifying the "readings" by Edgar Cayce can
be ignored.

http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/

Are all of these reports of charlatans?

***


When people have funding and report things to that agency. If it does not use Peer Review. you can have misguide, self-deluded people that are not trying to decieve anybody. On the other had we have PRO_CHRISTIAN??? that give religion a bad name. They lie deliberately, with knowlege and understanding.

I think not all systems are equal and in some subjects OVERSIGHT is weak.
josephus

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