Recognizing Incoherence

Consider this sentence: Zebras are heavier spellers than giraffes.

The sentence is easily seen to be incoherent. Even though the words all have meaning, and the structure or syntax of the sentence is correct, the words don't fit together in a meaningful way. The proposition is literally nonsense.

Now consider this state of affairs: a colleague walks into the office and reports that it has begun to snow. You look out the window and confirm that it is indeed snowing. Your observation corresponds to your colleague's report.

In both cases something very interesting is going on, usually without us being aware of it. Somehow, we're able to recognize phenomena like incoherence and correspondence, but how? What is actually occurring in our cognitive apparatus when we recognize that words don't cohere or that other words accurately describe what's happening outside?

On the materialist view all that's involved here are electrochemical processes occuring in a lump of living matter in our heads, but how do events like electrons whizzing along neurons and molecules jumping across synapses cause us to recognize incoherence and correspondence?

What's the connection between the physical processes taking place in the brain when we read the sentence or look out the window and the conscious awareness that a particular pattern of words is either absurd or does in fact correspond to an actual state of affairs? Where in the brain does the awareness of incoherence and correspondence reside and what does this awareness "look" like?

Moreover, what would a tiny, miniaturized scientist, navigating her way through a brain which at that moment is recognizing incoherence, observe? She might witness a great deal of electrical activity and notice a lot of atoms jostling about, but how do these physical phenomena translate into an immaterial awareness that a combination of words is nonsensical?

Materialists will often reply that it's true that at this point we have no idea, but that we know too little at present about how the brain works to say how it does what it does. Someday, though, we'll able to explain it, and when we do the explanation will be in completely material terms.

Well, maybe, but there's a pretty serious problem here.

Physical things have weight, occupy space, and are made of atomic particles that possess electric charges. Mental events, on the other hand, share none of these properties. They have no weight or mass, they're non-spatial, they're made of no substance recognizable to science and they don't possess electric charge.

All that being so, it's clear that mental events such as recognizing incoherence and correspondence are not themselves material or physical. They're qualitatively different, so, in the absence of any plausible materialistic explanation, it makes sense to suspect that perhaps these mental events are somehow the product of an immaterial, non-physical element in our cognitive apparatus.

In other words, perhaps the physical brain is not the sole agent in our cognitive life. Perhaps the conscious experience of human beings, and maybe even other animals as well, is also the product of a spaceless, massless, immaterial mind.

Utilitarianism and Egoism

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but they nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’.

What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Singer is a utilitarian. He believes that he has a moral obligation to do the act that would produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. Yet Singer also is a metaphysical naturalist who believes there are no transcendent moral authorities to impose moral duties upon us.

These two beliefs are in tension with each other. To understand why, let's first see how he answers the interviewer's question about donating a kidney:

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do). That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney, and he feels bad, he feels guilty, about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either one right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway? Who or what is to hold him or us accountable for not giving the kidney? On naturalism there's no moral authority except one's own convictions and neither is there any ultimate accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between utilitarianism and egoism is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since blind impersonal processes cannot impose moral duties. Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trajectory of those processes can be morally wrong.

How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is if we believe that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent, personal, moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.

One (Partial) Explanation for Why Trump Won

In his recently released book titled Last Call for Liberty, cultural critic and public intellectual Os Guinness observes that the times in which we're living call for statesmen to emerge at the highest levels of government, but that no equivalent of Abraham Lincoln has stepped forward to speak on behalf of the better angels of the American republic. He writes:

If anyone did, their task would be gargantuan, for the present generation has rejected both the vision and the manner of the sixteenth president as decisively as many have rejected that of the founders.There is too little statesmanship to match the gravity of the hour, and too little analysis that goes beyond supporting one side of the other....

Guinness does not explicitly talk about our current leaders by name nor does he engage in political partisanship, but his words about the lack of statesmen aroused in me the thought that, in fact, the American people really don't want to be led by statesmen, and our politics of the last three decades are pretty good evidence of that.

For example, in the 1990s the Republicans nominated George H.W. Bush (1992) and Bob Dole (1996), two fine political eminences, to run for the office of the presidency. The Democrats nominated a scandal-plagued philanderer named Bill Clinton. The American people voted for Mr. Clinton - twice.

In the 2000s, the Republicans nominated John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), two very experienced and ideologically moderate political leaders very much in the mold of Bush and Dole. The Democrats nominated Barack Obama, a far-left Alinskyite community organizer with almost no political experience to speak of. The American people elected Mr. Obama - twice.

Finally, in frustration, rank and file Republicans decided that they'd had enough with nominating moderate statesmen. They concluded that the American electorate doesn't want statesmen, rather they desire in their leaders the same thing they demand in their entertainment: conflict, charisma, afflatus, glamour, scandal, drama, celebrity. The GOP rank and file realized that their party would never win another presidential election if they kept running responsible, straight-arrow grown-ups who didn't embody at least most of the traits of a rock or movie star.

After twenty years of losing (George W. Bush was an anomaly whose elections were abetted by the Democrats, who, forgetting what the Republicans hadn't yet learned, nominated two vanilla politicos, Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) who, in terms of personality, if not political temperament, could've been Republicans) the GOP base decided that they'd had enough.

They acknowledged that the people who'll get elected to top positions of leadership in twenty-first century United States are people who could have either stepped off the front page of a tabloid or who promise to hand out goodies like Santa Claus.

They recognized that neither experience, statesmanship nor character is important to the majority of American voters, certainly not those who vote Democratic. This sad conclusion was confirmed in the minds of many conservatives when the Democrats proceeded in 2016 to nominate for the presidency a thoroughly corrupt Hillary Clinton, of all people.

Having given up trying to get the voters' attention with fine men like the elder Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney, they finally said "Enough. Let's nominate the sort of man the American people apparently want."

So they nominated Donald Trump, and it proved to be an inspired choice. The Democrats hate him, of course, but only because he's a winner who's reversing the long march toward big brother socialism begun under Franklin Roosevelt and continued under presidents of both parties, but especially under President Obama.

If Trump were still the Democrat he once was, advancing the same policies that Mrs. Clinton would have advanced, the media would be slobbering with adoration and stumbling all over themselves to find excuses for his abrasive, combative style. He'd be the perfect Democrat candidate. They'd love his demeanor were he one of them, and no one would ever hear a peep about his sexual coarseness and legal indiscretions on the evening news.

I have a friend who laments that millions of women are "aching" that we've elected such a boorish individual to be our president, but I wonder whether they ache because of his vulgar talk or because he's a Republican rather than a Democrat. After all, millions of women just like the ones who ostensibly lament Mr. Trump's ascendency, voted for John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and now Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey who has been credibly accused of sexual congress with underage girls in the Dominican Republic.

So why would women vote for these men but express revulsion and loathing for Donald Trump? Perhaps it's because they all had D's after their names, a circumstance which often wins absolution from female admirers for behavior that'd earn a Republican a trip to the political guillotine.

The point is that the majority of the American electorate really doesn't want moderate statesmen. They want bread and circuses, signs and wonders. If they wanted statesmen some of those four Republican candidates mentioned above would've been elected president.

But, because those men all pretty much got trounced, the frustrated Republican base threw up its collective hands and gave us Donald Trump, and many of the people who excused the behavior of the philanderer ("character doesn't matter" we were told) and swooned at the speeches and the crease in the pants of the community organizer, now profess to be outraged that the American people have ensconced Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

They have no one to blame but themselves.

Seeing Racists Behind Every Tuba

So, it's happened again.

This time it was four members of a Georgia high school marching band during their halftime show spelling out a racially insulting bit of slang which provoked instant outrage among the unthinking and uncritical. They blamed racism. They blamed Trump. They blamed white people in general.

Here's a sample of the Twitter comments:

• “If I ever seen one of those white band mates at Brookwood in Gwinnett County just know I’ll be [sic] the s**t out of them,” one user wrote. “Those kids need a** whoopings. I have that.”
• “At times I attempt to convince myself that racism isn’t A BIG THING … in youth/HS sports,” another user said. “But then things like THIS happen. Thank you Brookwood HS for showing your True School Spirit!”
• “Brookwood has been a racist ass school forever why is anyone shocked,” another remarked.
• “The hate is real,” one user commented.
• “Inspired no doubt by the words & vitriol spouted by the Great Leader in the WH — what an embarrassment 4 all the good people of Georgia, of Gwinnet [sic] County & of Brookwood High School,” another user said.
• “There should not remain one black student in the band, in the football team, or at Brookwood High School,” another user offered.

As many times as this sort of thing has happened (See here, here and here for other examples), you'd think people would learn to hold their righteous indignation in check until the facts come out, but some people just can't wait to display their virtue to the world by condemning the parties responsible for such unconscionable acts of racial bigotry.

Except, the band members who performed this "prank," it turns out, were two African-Americans, one Asian and one Hispanic, all of whom thought it would be "funny". In a way it was. It was funny to see the knee-jerk reaction of the folks quoted above who literally didn't know what they were talking about.

Perhaps the lesson here is that when political and/or social decorum appears to have been transgressed, and before we begin willy-nilly calling down fire and brimstone upon the offenders, we should at least wait until we know the facts. It would keep us from looking foolish and spare us a lot of embarrassment.

Minds, Computers and Chinese Rooms

There's lots of talk about computers soon being able to "think" like human beings and maybe even bringing about an AI apocalypse. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor strongly dissents from this view, however.

He grants that humans can use computers to do despicable things but that computers themselves will never be able to think.

Egnor writes:

A cornerstone of the development of artificial intelligence is the pervasive assumption that machines can, or will, think. Watson, a question-answering computer, beats the best Jeopardy players, and anyone who plays chess has had the humiliation of being beaten by a chess engine....Does this mean that computers can think as well as (or better than) humans think? No, it does not.

Computers are not “smart” in any way. Machines are utterly incapable of thought.

The assertion that computation is thought, hence thought is computation, is called computer functionalism. It is the theory that the human mind is to the brain as software is to hardware. The mind is what the brain does; the brain “runs” the mind, as a computer runs a program.

However, careful examination of natural intelligence (the human mind) and artificial intelligence (computation) shows that this is a profound misunderstanding.

Citing the 19th century German philosopher Franz Brentano, Egnor observes that computers lack a fundamental and critical characteristic of all thoughts. They lack "aboutness", or what philosophers call intentionality. Here's what he means:

All thoughts are about something, whereas no material object is inherently “about” anything. This property of aboutness is called intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Every thought that I have shares the property of aboutness—I think about my vacation, or about politics, or about my family. But no material object is, in itself, “about” anything. A mountain or a rock or a pen lacks aboutness—they are just objects. Only a mind has intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Another word for intentionality is meaning. All thoughts inherently mean something. A truly meaningless thought is an oxymoron. The meaning may be trivial or confusing, but every thought entails meaning of some sort. Every thought is about something, and that something is the meaning of the thought.

Computation, however, is an algorithmic process. It's the matching of an input to an output. There's no meaning to what the computer does. Whatever meaning we ascribe to the process is, in fact, imposed by our minds, it doesn't arise from within the machine.

What computers do, then, is represent the thoughts of the person designing, programming, and/or using it:

Computation represents thought in the same way that a pen and paper can be used to represent thought, but computation does not generate thought and cannot produce thought.

Only minds can think. Machines cannot.

When a materialist thinks about her materialism she's essentially disproving her fundamental belief that the material brain is all that's necessary to account for her thoughts. How can electrochemical reactions along material neurons be about something? Electrons whizzing across a synapse are not about anything. They have no meaning in themselves. The meaning must come from something else.

Nor do computers understand. In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to a human being's cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and goes like this:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You're living in China, however, and have a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth there's a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book, and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to an algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing.

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and we do understand, either our brains are not just computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

Postmodern Assumptions

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites. Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

CIA Catastrophe

Michael Walsh has a piece at PJ Media that reveals the worst intelligence catastrophe to hit the U.S. (excluding the failure to detect the 9/11 plot) in decades.

According to Walsh the following story broke on November 2nd. The media, evidently fixated on the pending "Blue Wave" and loath to publicize anything that might tarnish the image of the Obama presidency, has paid it little heed, but if it's true it is a huge bombshell of a story:

In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.

“When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence official.

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide.

The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.

The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy — from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs — forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.

During a two year period starting in 2010 the Chinese and the Iranians, were able to systematically roll up our intelligence assets in these countries and eventually execute more than 30 agents working for the CIA. They were able to do this because the CIA had been using lax, outdated internet communications security.

Much more detail on this fiasco is provided by Walsh at the link.

If the media wants a scandal, and, of course, they always do, they might try forgetting about "Russian collusion" and look more deeply into this failure. It might be helpful if they'd call for congressional investigations into how and why this happened, who was primarily responsible, what the extent of the damage has been and what role, if any, this played in the Obama administration's obsession with closing the Iranian nuclear deal.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face."

But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Just Made it All Up

After all the media did to destroy Justice Kavanaugh you'd think they could find a few minutes to devote to this revelation, but, alas, evidently they're too preoccupied chasing down the next shiny object in their hyper-attenuated field of vision.

It turns out that one of the women who accused Judge Kavanaugh of having raped her is now admitting to having made the whole thing up. The following is from the link:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred another one of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers to the FBI for possible criminal prosecution after she admitted to Committee investigators that she made up allegations that Kavanaugh had raped her in a car.

This referral stems from an anonymous “Jane Doe” letter that the committee received in September that, in graphic detail, claimed that Justice Kavanaugh had raped the letter writer ...“several times...” in the back of a car.

The accuser, a woman whose name, it later turned out, is Judy Munro-Leighton, sent an anonymous letter detailing the accusation to Senator Kamala Harris, who forwarded it to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators.

The letter was signed "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, CA and contained highly graphic sexual-assault accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. Here's more from the link:

The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her “several times each” in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location — beyond an automobile — in which these alleged incidents took place.

But the Committee took the letter seriously and even questioned Justice Kavanaugh under oath about the allegation.

They read him the letter in full as part of the questioning. In response to the anonymous allegations, Judge Kavanaugh unequivocally stated: “[T]he whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever — anything like that, nothing . . . . [T]he whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close.”

Later that day, September 26th, the Committee publicly released the transcript of that interview with Judge Kavanaugh, which included the full text of the Jane Doe letter.

Then, on October 3, 2018, Committee staff received an email from a Ms. Judy Munro-Leighton with a subject line claiming: “I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me.” Ms. Munro-Leighton wrote that she was “sharing with you the story of the night that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend sexually assaulted and raped me in his car” and referred to “the letter that I sent to Sen. Kamala Harris on Sept. 19 with details of this vicious assault.”

She continued: “I know that Jane Doe will get no media attention, but I am deathly afraid of revealing any information about myself or my family.” She then included a typed version of the Jane Doe letter.

But, as it turns out, the woman who claimed she underwent such a horrific sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh never experienced any such thing. She simply made the whole thing up in order to try to destroy Kavanaugh. Committee investigators were able to track her down and discovered that she was a left-wing activist who is decades older than Judge Kavanaugh and lives neither in Washington, D.C. nor in California, but in Kentucky:

She further confessed to Committee investigators that (1) she “just wanted to get attention”; (2) “it was a tactic”; and (3) “that was just a ploy.” She told Committee investigators that she had called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination.

Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation she made via her email to the Committee, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.”

When asked by Committee investigators whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said: “Oh Lord, no.”

So, where does Justice Kavanaugh go to get his reputation back? How do those who went along with the disgraceful charade at the confirmation hearings, who screamed like lunatics from the gallery, who gleefully dissected every salacious accusation on the media talk shows, who delighted in destroying this man's reputation and devastating his family - how do they look at themselves in the mirror without being overcome with nausea and self-loathing?

Maybe their consciences are so numbed by an "ends justifies the means" ethic that they simply shrug, laugh and blithely move on, indifferent to the wrecked lives they've left in their wake.

Fine people, these are.

The Metastasizing Cancer of Anti-Semitism

In the wake of the horrible slaughter of Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue last week in Pittsburgh there has been no shortage of condemnations of neo-nazi anti-semitism - which condemnations all decent people will endorse - but there has been almost total silence about the hateful rhetoric emanating from two of the most toxic sectors of anti-semitism in our country today: Muslim clerics and university leftists.

Why does our media only see hate on the far right? Why are they blind to the even more vicious and depraved rhetoric coming from other quarters? Perhaps one explanation is that progressives in the media see the far-right as the political enemy and see campus leftists and Muslim imams as political allies.

Like a cancer, anti-semitic hatred has metastasized to sectors of our culture far beyond its traditional locus in the far-right.

In July 26th of 2017 I ran a post on VP titled Hate Speech in which I wrote this:

Imagine that a prominent Christian pastor, speaking from the pulpit, called for the annihilation of gays. Imagine, too, that he referred to them as filth, and that his sermon was put up on YouTube for all the world to see. What do you suppose would be the reaction? Is it unreasonable to think there'd be nationwide 24/7 condemnation of that pastor's bigotry and his hateful speech?

The pastor would become a pariah, and Christianity would be discredited, don't you think? The left, especially, would be marching outside that pastor's church, demanding that he be removed from the pulpit.

Well, recently that very thing happened, sort of, and there's been almost no reaction to the preacher's hatred and bigotry whatsoever. Perhaps, you'll understand why when you read the details. You see, it wasn't a Christian pastor calling for the annihilation of gays in a sermon, it was a Muslim imam calling for the annihilation of Jews in a lecture:

In a July 21 lecture ... Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrians, will be called upon to kill all the Jews on "the last day."

Shahin is an Egyptian who has been in the U.S. since 1999. His mosque isn't in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it's in Davis, California.

In a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. "If it is in Palestine," for example, "or another place," hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the United States or Europe as well.

He also prayed that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem be liberated from "the filth of the Jews."

Here's the relevant clip:

This sort of rhetoric would not be tolerated were it to be delivered by a representative of any other religion or political party. Why is it tolerated when it's delivered by Muslims? Why are Muslims excused from standards of behavior we expect of everyone else in a tolerant, civilized society?

Shahin should be free to cite his beliefs, as repugnant as they are, but that doesn't mean that everyone else should just shrug and say, "Well, that's just what Islam teaches". Hatred of this sort, taking delight in the prospect of mass slaughter, should be exposed and roundly condemned, as it would be were it to come from any other source.

To the extent that Shahin accurately represents mainstream Islamic belief, and according to the article at the link he teaches Sunni Islam to Westerners, it sure makes it difficult to accept the notion that Islam is a religion of peace.

The situation among leftists on university campuses is in some ways worse because the virus of hate is reaching a much broader audience. The anti-semitism of students and faculty masquerades as a political critique of the state of Israel (anti-Zionism), but in fact, it results in a virulent hatred of Jews (anti-semitism) and anyone who supports them.

The following video explains what's going on. It's roughly 30 minutes long, but it offers a valuable perspective on how some university campuses in the New York area are cultivating the same sorts of poisonous hatreds that led a depraved individual to murder and maim last week in Pittsburgh.

Given what you'll see in this video you can be sure that similar crimes will happen again until we stop turning a blind eye to the cesspools of hate not only among neo-nazis but in our mosques and on our university campuses.

Quick Quiz

Quick, answer the following: Which prominent American politician said this (I paraphrase):

[T]here are some areas that the federal government ... should address and address strongly. One of these areas is the problem of illegal immigration. After years of neglect, I will take a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders. I will increase border controls by 50 percent and increase inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants. I will also sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

I want to be very clear about this: We are still a nation of immigrants; we should be proud of it. We should honor every legal immigrant here, working hard to become a new citizen. But we are also a nation of laws.

If you said Donald Trump give yourself an F. If you ascribed the passage to any Republican at all give yourself another F. The correct answer is President William Jefferson Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address. You can see the video here.

It's funny that there was no apoplexy on the left when President Clinton promised to crack down on illegal immigration, but when President Trump, or anyone else for that matter, criticizes the Democrats for opposing the securing of our border and ultimately allowing millions of illegal entrants into the country, progressives respond as though Trump had endorsed torturing puppies.

There's an interesting psychology at play in this double standard that can perhaps be summed up this way:

When a liberal Democrat says we need to enforce our immigration laws he's principled. When a moderate Democrat says we need to enforce our immigration laws she's practical. When a Republican says we need to enforce our immigration laws he's a pig-headed bigot.

Or, to say the same thing, whether people agree with what's being proposed or done depends foremost on who it is who's proposing or doing it.

This is, unfortunately, a kind of tribal thinking typical of adolescents and intellectual primitives, but it should have no place among voters in a free society nor among those political figures who lead our nation nor among those in the media who influence our nation's policy.

Five Things

In his new book Scientism and Secularism, philosopher J.P.Moreland lists and discusses five things that naturalistic science cannot account for or explain but which fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. The five phenomena are these:

1. The Origin of the Universe: That the universe had a beginning is the consensus view among cosmologists, but if it had a beginning what could have caused it. If the universe encompasses all of space, time and mass-energy then all of this exists only when the universe comes into being, which means that the universe came into being out of nothing. How? The answer to this question lies outside the purview of science.

2. The Origin of the Laws of Physics: As with the universe in general, the fundamental laws of physics exist only insofar as the universe does. Apart from a universe there are no such laws. An explanation of why just these laws exist and have the properties that they do is not an explanation that science is equipped to provide. Science can only tell us what the laws are and what they entail. It can't tell us why they are.

3. The Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos: As we've written on VP numerous times in the past the fundamental forces, parameters and constants which form the fabric of the universe are calibrated to unimaginably precise values such that an infinitesimally tiny deviation in the settings of any one of several dozen examples would make either the existence of the universe impossible or the existence of any kind of significant life impossible. Possible explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs, such as the multiverse hypothesis, even if they're credible, are metaphysical conjectures which lie outside the realm of science.

4. The Origin of Consciousness: Mental states such as holding a belief, understanding a joke, doubting a proposition, feeling pain, sensing red, recognizing the meaning of a text are phenomena which defy a scientific explanation. On the scientific view there was nothing but atoms, molecules and chemical compounds for eons of time until one day a completely different phenomenon, consciousness, emerged. How does physical matter produce conscious experience? Science has no plausible answer.

5. The Existence of Objective Moral Laws: Science can tell us what is the case in the natural world, but it cannot tell us what ought to be the case. It can explain why people have subjective moral sentiments, perhaps, but it cannot explain how objective moral duties could arise, where they would've come from, why they're binding on us, and so on. Indeed, any such explanation, even were one possible on naturalism, would be philosophical, not scientific.

These five phenomena come from Moreland's book, but the summaries of them are mine. Moreland's treatment of each is much more detailed than what I've provided here, and he argues that each of these is more compatible with a theistic ontology than any of them are with naturalism.

I enthusiastically recommend his book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, the explanatory limits of science, and/or the interface of science and theism.

Cultural Mindlessness

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death the thesis of which was that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by the electronic medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

A couple of years ago journalist Paul Brian wrote a column at The Federalist which amplified Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argued that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think. Here are some excerpts:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought.

Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reruns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny/annoying/brilliant/stupid/crazy/ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas. They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless sideline interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters."

Nor is religion immune. Too many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafeningly high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We are not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

There's more good stuff from Brian's article at the link.

Making Themselves Look Foolish

In the wake of the tragedy in Pittsburgh on Saturday in which a lunatic hater broke into a synagogue and murdered eleven Jewish congregants and wounded a number of others, some in the liberal media saw in this horrific slaughter an opportunity to score political points against President Trump.

Were the context surrounding their effort to smear the president not so tragic the effort itself would be amusing for its sheer absurdity.

Numerous attempts were made by commentators in liberal media outlets to accuse Mr. Trump of being an anti-semite whose rhetoric has nurtured a climate of hate so virulent that the more looney among his supporters feel justified in taking up weapons to kill Jews.

One wonders how intelligent people can sincerely make such an allegation given several widely known facts: First, the man who committed this crime was known to despise Donald Trump. He regarded the president as being too sympathetic to Jewish interests.

Second, the president's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are both followers of the Jewish faith.

Third, the president is a hero among Israeli Jews who have even named streets and plazas after him in Israel.

Fourth, President Trump has repeatedly condemned anti-semitism (see here and here) and all forms of bigotry.

Nevertheless, the progressive left is unfazed by any of this. They see a chance to discredit the president and they're not going to pass it up, even if it means making themselves look foolish and desperate.

If rhetoric has a causal effect on actions then we might ask when the left is going to start holding Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, et al. accountable for their hateful rhetoric toward Jews.

When are they going to hold people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton accountable for legitimizing people like this by being seen in their company? And when are liberals going to demand that universities clean up the left-wing anti-semitic garbage dumps that exist on some of our campuses?

Julia Ioffe in the Washington Post cites some ambiguous quotes and ads for which alleges Mr. Trump bears ultimate responsibility as proof that he has stoked ethnic resentments among the morally sick far right groups. She writes:

Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people.”

After I published a profile of Trump’s third wife, Melania, that displeased her — and his supporters — the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said, “I don’t have a message” for them.

Aside from the fact that Ioffe's claim that Trump averred that the white-supremacists at Charlottesville were fine people is dubious (A more charitable rendering is that he was referring to the fact that there were many people present at the Charlottesville protest who were not affiliated with the extremists of either left or right) her examples prove exactly what?

Surely, the fact that people can read into such things whatever they wish to support their own prejudices is no warrant for the conclusion that Mr. Trump is himself a Jew-hater or sympathetic to those who hate Jews. Mr. Trump is no more responsible for what this man did in Pittsburgh, and indeed arguably much less responsible, than Bernie Sanders is responsible for the actions of one of his campaign workers who shot up a GOP baseball practice and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise.

But none of this matters to our friends on the left. They seem determined to blame President Trump for anything and everything that goes wrong. If a meteorite strikes the earth causing widespread devastation the progressive media will somehow manage to convince themselves that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the catastrophe.

Perhaps the electorate will be swayed in November by the left's metronomic imputation of blame and their incessant moral outrage, or perhaps people will just tune it all out as so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. We'll see.

Meanwhile, here's something to consider. November 5th will be the one year anniversary of the deadliest attack on a house of worship in American history. On that date last year Devin Patrick Kelley walked into First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and killed 26 worshippers, including the pastor's daughter, and wounded dozens more. Kelley was an atheist who held Christianity and Christians in contempt.

Does the media hold prominent atheists who have written of their contempt for Christianity - people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris - responsible for this atrocity? Of course not, nor should they, but doing so would be far more justifiable than holding Donald Trump somehow responsible for the murders of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

Fatherhood Matters

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Katie's Soul

My classes have begun discussing what philosophers call the mind/body problem, that is, the question whether the brain alone can provide an adequate explanation for our cognitive experience or whether there's justification for believing that something else, an immaterial mind or soul, is also involved.

I did a post last summer on an article that sheds some very interesting light on this question, and I thought it might be worthwhile to post it again since it ties in with our class discussion. Here it is:

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has a fine piece at Plough.com in which he argues against the materialist view that we are simply material beings with no spiritual or mental remainder.

The materialist holds that everything about us that might be attributed to qualities like soul or mind are ultimately reducible to the physical structure of the material brain. Matter and the laws of physics can in principle explain everything.

The opening paragraphs of Egnor's essay call this view into serious question. He writes:

I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.

Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life.

She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

I’ve had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds. Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished her master’s degree in English literature, and is a published musician.

Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and half-full of water – doctors told his mother to let him die at birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves sports, and wears his hair long.

Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not all are. I’ve treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible?

Well, if materialism is true it's hard to see how it could be possible, but if materialism is false then there might be an explanation that includes a soul or mind that's somehow integrated with the brain but which is nevertheless not ultimately explicable in terms of the material stuff that makes us up.

Egnor goes on in his essay to show that mental processes like thoughts and sensations cannot be reduced to physical structures and also to explain why the materialist denial of human free will is almost certainly wrong.

He offers the sorts of arguments that are making it very difficult nowadays to be a consistent materialist. Indeed, some materialists are finding it so difficult to explain phenomena like human consciousness solely in terms of the material brain that they've even taken to denying that consciousness exists, but this seems like madness. After all, doesn't one have to be conscious in order to think about whether consciousness exists?

Evidently, some philosophers will go to any lengths, no matter how bizarre, to avoid having to accept any idea that may lead to the existence of anything that's consistent with a theistic worldview.

Egnor concludes his column with this:

There is a part of Katie’s mind that is not her brain. She is more than that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her that is immaterial.... There is a part of Katie that didn’t show up on those CAT scans when she was born.

Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

So You'd Like to be a Time-Traveler?

Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf wrote a short piece for Scientific American last summer in which he explained why he believes time travel into the past, even if technologically possible, would be impossible to manage in any practical way.

The difficulty arises because of the fact that any travel in time also requires travel in space. He calls this the spatial problem. Here's his explanation:

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Imagine you have a nifty time machine and decide to pop one month into the past .... In a typical story you’ll appear at precisely the same location, just a month earlier. But how on earth does your time machine ... get you to that unique physical place?

On Earth’s surface we’re in constant motion. The planet’s spin has us racing around at about 1,600 kilometers an hour at the equator. The Earth is orbiting the Sun at an average of 110,000 kilometers an hour. The Sun is currently moving relative to the center of the Milky Way galaxy at about 828,000 kilometers an hour, and our Local Group of galaxies is plunging through the cosmos at a velocity of about 2.4 million kilometers an hour relative to the cosmic microwave background.

That radiation field offers a way to establish a universally agreed-upon measure of rest or motion.

But space is of course expanding, so on very large scales no physical object can be said to be truly at rest with respect to others – it may just be equally not at rest in all directions.

That’s gets us back to our time travel experiment. To go back 1 month, and to appear at the same place ... you must also move a significant amount of physical distance. And you must do this extremely accurately. This is the spatial problem.

Let’s take the Earth’s motion around the Sun. A month of orbit corresponds to moving in an arc of approximately 78 million kilometers. During that same period the entire solar system will have also moved approximately 600 million kilometers around our galaxy, and our entire Local Group of galaxies will have swept through about 1.7 billion kilometers of space relative to the cosmic microwave background. Not only do you need to traverse those kinds of distances, you need to get it correct to within a part in a trillion.

In other words: your time travel device has to be exceedingly good at figuring out where in the universe to place you, not just when....

On the one hand it’s scientifically interesting to think about how to actually deal with coordinates in a real, and very dynamic universe. Where you are at this instant is not a fixed point in any cosmic sense. Indeed, you follow a quite complex trajectory through the universe, and thanks to complicated gravitational and mechanical interactions and behaviors this trajectory is probably not fully predictable.

Earth’s spin varies, its orbit varies subtly over very long timescales, and even our intergalactic motion will evolve as other galaxies and mass concentrations get closer or further away over time.

Scharf's point is that because every spatial location is moving relative to other spatial locations in the universe, if you were to travel back in time, say, one week you would not arrive at the same room you're sitting in now. You'd probably find yourself floating in space somewhere far removed from the earth which has hurtled on through space in the intervening week.

True time travel, to be practical, must also somehow factor in the motion of all the spatial locations in the universe so that the time traveler doesn't wind up marooned in space.

Scharf concludes with a mention of one implication of this problem:

It’s also fun to consider that this could provide an answer to the question of why, if time travel is ever invented, we haven’t been visited by beings from the future.... Perhaps the reason is that no one has (ever) solved the spatial problem, and the cosmos is littered with time travelers adrift between the stars and galaxies.

Richards' Short Argument Against Materialism

Students are sometimes confused by the fact that in describing the worldview called naturalism three different terms are often used interchangeably.

Naturalism (the view that nature is all there is, there's no supernatural, at least insofar as it impinges upon the physical universe) is often used synonymously with materialism (the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy) and physicalism (the view that everything can be explained, at least in principle, by the laws and processes of physics and chemistry).

The term materialism is often used when writing for a popular audience and physicalism is usually employed when writing for a more philosophically sophisticated readership.

At any rate, on materialism there's only one substance, matter/energy. There's no immaterial mind or soul, or if there is it is somehow generated by the material brain. Materialism is not exactly the same as naturalism, but most naturalists are materialists.

There are a number of arguments against the materialist view that all of our mental experience is reducible to the workings of the brain and that there is no such thing as an immaterial mind. One such argument is based on what philosophers refer to as intentionality. Intentionality is the phenomenon that various conscious states are about or of or for something.

For example, a belief is about something (e.g. an approaching storm), a desire is for something (e.g. pizza) and a sensation is of something (e.g. redness). These are called intentional states.

Philosopher Jay Richards explains how intentional states are an argument against materialism in a short piece at MindMatters. He writes:

Imagine a scenario where I ask you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae, while a doctor does an MRI and takes a real-time scan of your brain state. We assume that the following statements are true:

1. You’re a person. You have a “first person perspective.”
2. You have thoughts.
3. I asked you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae.
4. You freely chose to do so, based on my request.
5. Those thoughts caused something to happen in your brain and perhaps elsewhere in your body.

Notice that the thought in question—your first person, subjective experience of thinking about the chocolate sundae—would not be the same as the pattern in your brain. Nor would it be the same as an MRI picture of the pattern. One glaring difference between them: Your brain pattern isn’t about anything. Your thought is. It’s about a chocolate sundae.

We have thoughts and ideas—what philosophers call “intentional” states—that are about things other than themselves. We don’t really know how this works, how it relates to the brain or chemistry or the laws of physics or the price of tea in China. But whenever we speak to another person, we assume it must be true. And in our own case, we know it’s true. Even to deny it is to affirm it.

Points (1) through (5) above are common sense. In other words, everyone who hasn’t been persuaded by skeptical philosophy assumes them to be true. But it’s not merely that everyone assumes them. They are basic to pretty much any other intellectual exercise, including arguing.

That’s because you have direct access to your thoughts and, by definition, to your first-person perspective. You know these things more directly than you could conclude, let alone know, any truth of history or science. You certainly know them more directly than you could possibly know the premises of an argument for materialism.

That matters because (1) through (5) defy materialist explanation.

The materialist will want to say one of three things to avoid the implication of a free agent whose thoughts cause things to happen in the material world:

A) Your “thoughts” are identical to a physical brain state.
B) Your “thoughts” are determined by a physical brain state.
or C) You don’t really have thoughts.

And if any one of (A), (B), or (C) is true, then most or all of (1) through (5) are false.

So here’s the conclusion: What possible reason could we have for believing (A), (B), or (C) and doubting (1) through (5)? Remember that if you opt for (A), (B), or (C), you can’t logically presuppose (1) through (5). Surely this alone is enough to conclude that we can have no good reason for believing the materialist account of the mind.

To summarize, electrochemical reactions in the brain are not about anything, they just are. So how do we get from an electrochemical reaction to an intentional state? How does brute matter by itself produce an intentional state - aboutness, or forness or ofness?

No one knows. The materialist must simply respond that even though we don't know how it does it, it must do it because materialism is true.

This response, however, is an example of the fallacy of begging the question. In order to defend the truth of materialism the materialist assumes the very thing, the truth of materialism, that the non-materialist is calling into question.

The Biggest Threat

Over the years I've done several posts on the threat posed to our very survival by the deployment of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons. These pose the most frightening dangers to our nation first, because we seem totally unprepared to counter them and second, because almost any nation with a modest nuclear capability can use them to essentially cripple our ability to defend ourselves and throw us economically back to the 19th century.

The collateral effect of this would be catastrophic, unleashing total social chaos.

The nature of these weapons is explained in this post from 2016, but the gist of it is that a single nuclear warhead launched from space, or even from a ship at sea, and detonated high in the atmosphere over the center of the country, would unleash a pulse of electromagnetic energy that could completely fry all electrical grids and electronic devices within a vast area of the U.S.

All banks, hospitals, financial institutions, vehicles and most industries would be knocked out of commission for an indefinite period of time. There'd be no way to access financial resources, no jobs, no medical care, no food, no water, no sanitation.

Millions would perish, not from the blast itself, but from its aftereffects. The same effects could result from a solar superstorm such as occurred in 1859 before there was an electrical infrastructure to be damaged by it.

Readers are urged to go to the above link to learn more about EMP. Awareness of this threat is especially important in light of a recent report issued by the congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. An article on this report by Bill Gertz in the Washington Free Beacon reveals that:

China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are preparing nuclear electronic pulse attacks from space in a future conflict to cripple the U.S. military and plunge the United States into darkness, according to a declassified study.

"The United States critical national infrastructure faces a present and continuing existential threat from combined-arms warfare, including cyber and manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and natural EMP from a solar superstorm."

"Within the last decade, newly nuclear-armed adversaries, including North Korea, have been developing the ability and threatening to carry out an EMP attack against the U.S.," the report said.

"Such an attack would give countries that have only a small number of nuclear weapons the ability to cause widespread, long-lasting damage to U.S. critical national infrastructures, to the United States itself as a viable country, and to the survival of a majority of its population."

I don't like sounding like the guy wearing the sandwich board shouting that "The End Is Near", but on the other hand, there's a distressing lack of awareness in the West about the nature of this threat and how vulnerable we are to it. Near the end of his essay Gertz writes that:

The report also criticizes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the electric power industry for failing to address the EMP danger from either attack or solar storm. Private industry also has failed to understand the threat posed by EMP to high-voltage transformers.

An informed citizenry is essential to confounding this threat. We can do our part by voting in November for the candidates most likely to push for and fund the necessary counter-measures if they're elected to the House of Representatives or the Senate.

I'll let you decide under which party's auspices such candidates are most likely to be running.

A Roll of the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time").

Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith, doubt and skepticism.

The discussions are almost always pleasant and informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually exemplars of what such conversations should be, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication of the fine-tuning argument try this post and the debate it links to.