In his recently-released book Darwin Devolves biochemist Michael Behe argues that the genome of living things is the product not of material or physical forces, but of a mind. Mind is the ultimate reality and underlies both the cosmos and life.
This is, of course, anathema to materialists who deny there is any such thing as an immaterial mind, whether cosmic or human. Mind, materialists allege, is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach.
On this view, the brain is like an advanced computer that takes electrochemical inputs and converts them into outputs, but this analogy to a computer surely fails to fully capture what's going on in our cognitive experience.
For example, there are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not. Human beings are aware, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth.
In addition, they appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.
Computers have none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel.
Some materialist philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland have concluded that since it's difficult to see how these capabilities and experiences can be produced by the mere exchange of electrons amongst atoms arrayed along a neuron it must be the case that these phenomena are actually just illusions of some sort.
The Churchlands write, that "common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist," but even an illusion is a mental state that's hard to explain in terms of chemical reactions. How does a molecular interaction give rise to an illusion?
Moreover, there's something very odd about philosophers saying that the beliefs they hold, write books about, and teach their students - beliefs about materialism, for example - don't really exist. It's equally peculiar that philosophers would insist that their understanding of materialism is nothing more than chemical reactions in their brains. If that's so, why should anyone think it's true? Chemical reactions are not the sort of thing that can be either true or false.
Philosopher Paul Feyerabend noted once that, "Practically any version of materialism would severely undermine common-sense psychology," and indeed he was right.
As neuroscientist Michael Egnor drolly observes in the video below, materialists "...understand that materialism cannot explain the mind [but] rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind.”
The video is courtesy of Evolution News and is the second in the series titled Science Uprising.