Transhumanism Is a Dead End (2017)

We observe many correlations between the neurological and the mental, and it seems likely that in the years and decades to come we will learn many more. Materialists argue that this is evidence that the mental is a product of the neurological. But what about the idealist alternative, that the neurological is a product of the mental? An observed correlation between two phenomena cannot, by itself, tell us which of the two is more fundamental.

By and large, we agree. But to be a little pedantic... the brain isn't the whole story. "Muscle memory" is what happens when your peripheral nervous system learns -- without practice, most people can't throw a ball with equal skill in both hands. The nervous system in our gut is vast, complex, and poorly understood. It seems like this shouldn't be significant in cognition and memory... but the enteric nervous system may play a critical role in mental health.

So if we want to use computers as a metaphor your consciousness is the software, and your brain and body is the hardware. If your HDD is corrupted you lose your memories, if your CPU is damaged your logic is faulty, etc.. Where the metaphor breaks might break down is that your OS, that intangible something that makes you -- you is remote, somewhere else. Or maybe you just have a copy.

Maybe there's a conflict in the idea that a consciousness requires a vessel of some form to exist in our universe but I don't see it.

I do admit that this presents a very very weak form of consciousness since it's immutable, static, and almost all of much of what informs your identity is local but that seems to mirror the human experience, right?

> there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions ...

Since we only get to access consciousness through these malfunctioning peripherals, how would you know if there was?

It predicts that a human equipped with a non-local, non-materialistic mind (let’s call it "soul" for short) will behave differently from the same human without such a mind. He will, for example, write "I think therefore I am" where a soul-less (but otherwise materially equivalent human body) wouldn’t.

Now if you trace back the chain of events of this deviation, you will trace the movements of the hand (that wrote that sentence) to muscle movements. Muscle movements can be traced back to neural impulses, which can be traced back to the brain.

So, ultimately, non-materialism states that the brain of a soul-ful humain behaves differently from a soul-less human one.

In practice, it means that sometimes, neurons that should have fired (according to the laws of physics) don’t, and neurons that should have stayed at rest (according to the laws of physics) will fire. Those mismatches are first measurable manifestations of the immaterial mind ("soul") in the physical universe.

tl;dr: non-materialism predicts that there will be significant (greater in magnitude that thermal noise, at the very least) violations of the laws of physics (such as thermodynamics, chemistry and electromagnetism) in the brain.

argument from antiquity.

See: the will and representations

> I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I think that even if science can reduce processes to simple understandable components, this doesn't take away from everyday life.

The fact that a book consists of characters doesn't make it worse.

The fact that you're simply a specific configuration of atoms* doesn't devalue you as a human being.

* or evolution of this configuration in time, but that's a story for another time

The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.

Well, as a person who wears glasses, I can assure you to the contrary.

I don't think any transhuman has a vision of transhumanity where you are physically impossible to suicide or are forced to interact with certain people.