My philosophy professor says that thinking is not the motion of atoms in the brain, therefore it is seperate from the material world, therefore the soul/spirit exists, and therefore god exists.
She has failed [in my eyes] to prove that thinking is not the motion of atoms in the brain.
I don’t want to get into Great Debates territory [yet] so I won’t ask all the questions that either answer to this question yields.
It isn’t established whether or not our consciousness is purely a result of physical processes or if something else (e.g. a soul) is involved. Lots of scientists would believe that our mind only involves physical processes (materialism) but I don’t think they have scientifically proven that their beliefs are right. One popular supporter of materialist theories of the mind is [url=http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm]Daniel Dennett
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who has written many articles and books on the subject.
Perhaps if we could develop artificial brains that learn to act just like intelligent humans then the argument for materialism would be more convincing. (Assuming that those artificial brains were conscious)
Computers processing is not the motion of atoms in the circuit boards. Does that make it separate from the material world, and therefore proof of god? (obviously being a bit cheeky, electrons aren’t atoms)
Seriously though, your prof’s initial statement is not a fact. I believe, like many do, that thought processes are complex interactions of neurons firing. Neurons transmit information by moving ions across a barrier. Hence thought processes are just “atoms moving about”.
I admit that I’m open to both sides of this but I’m really leaning towards this side. She insists that the brain is required for thinking but not sufficient for it. I’m pretty sure it is sufficient.
Thinking is separate from the material world?
So when you drink alcohol and your thought processes are altered, how did the alcohol affect the spirit world?
When people suffer brain injuries that permanently alter their personalities, how did the damage cut across into the non-material world?
How does Alzheimer’s disease infect the soul?
To be more accurate though, the brain’s processing activity can be summed up as the motion of action potentials through nerve cells and the motion of molecules between nerve cells.
I asked her all these questions. Re: Alcohol she said she drank several Guinesses and A still = A so her reason wasn’t affected (don’t see how that proves anything…)
Re: Sodium Penathol (one of the things I specifically asked her about), she didn’t know what it was but that’s when she busted out with “The brain is necessary for thought but not sufficient for thought.”
You’ve got this backwards. Science deals only with physical processes, so it would be impossible to prove scientifically the existence of a non-material “soul.”
From a scientist’s point of view, it’s up to the proponents of “soul” to provide evidence for its existence, a theory for its function and connection to the brain, and falsifiable claims with predictive power. If they can’t do that, then soul is simply a matter of opinion about which no meaningful statements can be made.
I’ve never heard an argument for a non-material source for consciousness that was more persuasive than the OP’s professor: the mind can’t “just” arise from atoms. It just can’t. I don’t want it to. It’s insulting to my self esteem if my brilliant mind is “just” atoms and not connected somehow to God.
The OP is right to find something lacking in this argument.
BTW, have you asked the prof in what ways is the brain not sufficient to account for the observed phenomena?
Just proves she didn’t drink enough.
Certainly, it’s not. The brain needs to be a human brain, or a brain of similar size and complexity compared to the body it controls. The brain needs to be functioning properly, with connections to sensory input and motor output via a nervous system or some analogue. That is sufficient for thought. (The sensory input and motor output may or may not be necessary, but having them is certainly sufficient.)
Proof: every being we know of with such a brain thinks, or is at least functionally indistinguishable from beings that think. This is only an inductive proof, of course, but deductively, I can’t prove that anyone thinks but me. (And maybe Uncle Cecil, I suppose. 
)
Your professor can disprove this argument quite easily, of course, simply by finding a creature with such a brain that does not think. For example, a human who acts normally, has measurable brain activity (via EEG, MRI, etc.) in all normal ways, but does not think. If she is concerned about the difficulty of finding evidence of lack of thought in such a creature, respectfully suggest that a person who makes statements like ‘the brain is necessary for thought but not sufficient for thought’ might be a good candidate to look at.
Er, maybe that last isn’t such a good idea.
It’s crap like this that led me to drop out of philosophy grad school. One’s required to take colleagues who spew this kind of nonsense seriously. :rolleyes:
No, I certainly wouldn’t say that. At the very least, thinking is an interaction with the material world.
Who says it has to? If the wires in your TV get frayed and your picture gets foggy, that’s not the fault of the broadcaster, but the receiver. If brain is a mechanism for communication between the spiritual and the physical, the effect of alcohol on thought processes should be expected.
Same thing. Like sending TV programs out over radio bands – not all the information arrives at the destination in a way that can be interpreted.
There is no evidence that the soul is affected; but lots that the brain is.
Frankly, I think that teacher is out in Neverland, and that atoms certainly are moving around in the brain in parts (potentials/photons/electrons) and as whole atoms (replacement of electrolytes, blood flow, etc.) What is missing is hard evidence connecting thoughts with the firing of neurons. Not that it doesn’t exist.
:D¬
What about when the atoms in your brain think about themselves, as atoms in a brain? Is that solely soul?
Why do you feel the need to posit an origin for thoughts (or whatever) that is outside the brain?
Also, my examples were intended to pointedly raise the question of how a non-material “spiritual” world can interact with the material world. By what mechanism does something with no physical properties influence anything that is physical?
What your Teacher is arguing is starndard Descartian dualism and, AFAIK, theres no serious philosophical school of thought anywhere that still takes this seriously. In short, your prof is a nutjob and it surprises me that he/she doesn’t know this.
Actually, the mind-body problem (which is what we’re discussing) is a hot topic in philosophy. Plenty of serious philosophers agree with your prof, and they don’t have to be Cartesians to do so.
There are many arguments for why the brain cannot be sufficient for thought, or why there must be a non-material element to human conciousness. I don’t happen to buy any of them, but they aren’t all easy to dismiss.
Here is a link to the website of one of the most important of those philosophers and a very brief summary of his argument for non-physicalism from his famous article “What Mary Didn’t Know.”
I was thinkin about this more last night as I drifted off, and came to the conclusion that your professor is either using this as a strawman to test your critical thinking, or she deserves to be fired…
…thinking is not the motion of atoms in the brain…
Not proven by any means, as discussed above.
not the motion of atoms in the brain, therefore it is seperate from the material world
Computers processing, radio waves, magnetism, gravity, etc are not the motion of atoms. Does that make them separate from the physical world?
it is seperate from the material world, therefore the soul/spirit exists
This is only proven if you define the soul as the part of a person that exists outside of the physical world. Most people do not, but consider the soul to be the essence of a human being. The statement kind-of flows, but it not a foregone conclusion immune to criticism.
the soul/spirit exists, and therefore god exists
Now there is one wild-assed leap of faith. Why must existence of a soul prove the existence of a God? That’s like saying that existence of a pizza proves the existence of Italy. Or existence of a printing press proves the existence of Guttenberg. Pretty lame if you ask me.
There is a non-material element to thought, whether one believes in a soul or not.
The pattern of matter in the brain is not itself material, just as the pattern of words on a printed page is not itself ink.
And I would argue that, ultimately, matter itself is a pattern. After all, what are electrons and quarks? Are they things, chunks of something? I would say that they are rules for behavior, that is, patterns, no different than the rules that exist in a computer program.
In the end, the whole of the universe is nothing more than a probability distribution.
I’m missing your point here. Could you expand on that a little?
Dualism, the question of whether there is a non-physical element to ourselves or not, is a very old philosophical problem. I haven’t yet seen a thoroughly convincing argument one way or the other, although I personally lean against dualism.
Francis Crick ( of Crick and Watson, discoverers of the structure of DNA) has argued in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis that dualism is wrong. The basis of his argument was to focus on one small element of consciousness, vision, and demonstrate that it arises from physical processes. We’re not just talking about optics and light-sensitive cells in the retina but about the qualia of vision, e.g. the perceived “redness” of red. It’s an interesting read, but his conclusions can be disputed. “The Astonishing Hypothesis” of the title is the idea that there is no soul or spirit, which I guess shows that Crick didn’t know philosophers have been fighting this one out for some time.
Mathematician Roger Penrose on the other hand has argued in his book The Emperor’s New Mind that the human mind can perform non-algorithmic operations and so must be more than something simply material as understood by current physics. It’s not really a pro-dualist book however - his conclusion is that there are currently unknown physical mechanisms at the quantum level that are necessary for conciousness. I only skimmed the book so I can’t really comment on how convincing he is.
Lekatt has suggested on these boards that the brain is analagous to a televison set - it is necessary to produce the pictures and sound, but it is not the source of the pictures and sound. The fact that we can make the picture go black-and-white by poking around inside a TV does not prove that we have found the source of colour. This neatly counters the arguments about the effects of drugs or brain damage on the mind - Lekatt’s suggestion is that you’ve affected the reciever, and the “spirit” remains inviolate.
Lekatt’s argument bothers me on two points. Firstly, if I have a soul, it is a pretty important part of me, the governor of who I am and what kind of a person I am. If brain damage or drugs results in me losing parts of my memory, or only drawing the left hand sides of things, I can accept these as “reciever damage”, analagous to a damaged TV set losing the sound and half the picture. However, brain damage or drugs can also change personality, and I have trouble accepting that as reciever damage. Drug-induced paranoia for example seems to me to be a change in the soul, and if drugs can change the soul then the “soul” is physical.
The other problem with the TV analogy is that the TV signal affects the material world - it induces small modulated voltages in the tuning circuits. You can detect the TV signal in other ways, or infer its existence from close observation of the workings of the TV. As I type this, waves of potential are shooting down the nerves in my arms to my hands and causing the muscles to contract and press the keys. Backtracking the signals to my spinal cord and up into the convoluted network of neurons that is my brain, you can in theory follow the signals - that neuron was tripped by that one, that one by this one etc. until you get to the neuron[s] that were tripped by the “soul”, the non-physical entity. Poke around in the brain enough, you have to find the “tuner.” And if a physical neuron or whatever can be affected by the non-physical “spirit” world, then we can build our own physical tuner and detect the “spirit” world, something that as far as I know hasn’t been achieved.
Lekatt’s beliefs are based on his interpretation of a powerful personal experience which I don’t feel entitled to comment on. He could claim that we don’t know enough about the workings of the brain to refute his TV analogy, and he’d be right. But hopefully some day we will know enough to answer this one for sure. In the meantime, I direct you to the transcripts of the 2003 Reith lectures “The Emerging Mind” which details all kinds of things about the brain and how it can go wrong.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture1.shtml
Lecture 1 among other things documents a problem called “Capgras’ syndrome” where the patient sees familiar and loved people as imposters “that’s not my real mother!” A large amount of the material documented would seem to me to be problems affecting the “soul” and not the “receiver”, and therefore weigh against the dualist model. The lecturer’s book Phantom’s in the Brain (by V. S. Ramachandran) is also well worth getting hold of, both fascinating and entertaining.
BTW, isn’t anyone going to point out (and do something about) the fact that this is definitely GD territory, not GQ?
Here are some criticisms of Penrose’s theories:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MistakesOfRogerPenrose
http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/EPL/Penrose.html
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/psyche-index-v2.html
The second link talks about artificial neural nets and their ability to do things like learn patterns from incomplete data and infer things without complete rules.