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Searching for the “God particle” … or for God?
Christopher Potter writes in the New York Post:
If the hype is to be believed, scientists may be mere weeks away from answering one of the most mysterious questions of existence: Why is there anything at all? The long search for the so-called “God particle” may soon be over. And if it is, there will be Nobel Prizes all round for everyone in on the discovery.
Hmm, yes, “if” the hype is to be believed …we are just weeks away from knowing why the universe exists!
The hypothetical God particle, by the way, is something that, one billionth of a second after the Big Bang occurred, changed massless light to something with mass, and thus initiated the material universe. But where did the light come from? Not from a particle, Mr. Potter.
The article, which is unusually long for the Post, ends with a panegyric to science:
Science insists on our commonality. DNA analysis shows us that everyone alive today shares a mother who lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. Our DNA also shows us that we are descended not just from apes but from slime, a story that takes our descent back some 3 billion years. But the story does not stop there. We are, as poets often remind us, made of star dust. In turn, the stars themselves are clouds of hydrogen gas that condensed and ignited. And even further back in time, before there was any hydrogen gas, the universe was once—for the merest moment in time after the Big Bang—a curious landscape in which there was a field of energy made out of Higgs bosons.
The story of science as we understand it today can now trace our descent—and the descent of all things—back to the origins of the universe. Surely that makes science the greatest story ever told. In a world filled with divisiveness of all kinds, how wonderful to be reminded that we are all in this together.
The search for the ultimate truth of existence—through science!. The search for the ultimate human unity and the overcoming of all human divisiveness—through science! Even The Greatest Story Ever Told—told by science! Why is it that materialists, atheists, secular humanists, Communists, Randians, and Nazis, who all deny the existence of God, are always trying to create a substitute God? I mean, what is their problem?
Let’s put it this way. Given that even the people who vociferously and dogmatically insist on the non-existence of God keep constructing some kind of God, doesn’t that suggest that the need for God is built into human nature? And if that need is built into our nature, doesn’t that tell us something objective about the universe? For example, we have a built-in need for food, and guess what? Food exists! The desire for food is not just a pathetic wish to escape from the anxiety and meaninglessness of a universe without food. Our desire for food actually corresponds with, fits with, the real world. Similarly, people have a built-in need for the companionship of the other sex, and guess what? The other sex exists! Our desire for the other sex is not just a delusory attempt to console ourselves in a lonely universe without the other sex. Similarly, people have a built-in need to understand things, and guess what? The world is intelligible! Our desire for intelligibility is not just our projection onto an unintelligible universe of our childhood experience that things make sense. So, since people have a built-in need for God, doesn’t that suggest that … God exists? Why, then, keep coming up with these tacky substitutes—material equality, the Brotherhood of Man, the German germ plasm, John Galt, even the God particle? Why not look for the real thing?
As evidence of what I’ve just said, just as I was writing this, an atheist commenter named Anon sent me a link to William Lobdell’s book Losing My Religion. The atheists have become evangels, sending out atheist books to people to win them over to atheism. Pretty soon they’ll be going door to door, like Jehovah’s Witnesses.
* * *
Which reminds me of a joke.
Question: What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian?
Answer: Someone who goes from door to do with nothing to say.
- end of initial entry -
Roland D. writes:
Hmm, yes, “if” the hype is to be believed …we are just weeks away from knowing why the universe exists!
The ironist in me recollects Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God.”
LA replies:
Now this is funny. As I was writing the entry, I thought of mentioning “The Nine Billion Names of God.” But then it didn’t seem to fit, since that story is not about proving the existence of God, but completing God’s purpose in creating the universe. So I didn’t mention it. And now you have mentioned it. So, what is the connection you see between the Clarke story and my entry?
LA continues:
Yes, now I see the connection: a scientific experiment is going to get at the ultimate truth of God.
Tim W. writes:
I guess we can stop believing in God now, since this particle just happened to appear at the right time, and just happened to possess the qualities necessary to turn light, which just happened to exist, into mass. And this mass just happens to operate according to laws of physics, which just happen to exist. All this, of course, occurred after the Big Bang just happened to take place from a singularity that just happened to exist in a void that just happened to exist.
But we can’t stop there, we must conclude from all of the above that there is precise equality between races, genders, and sexual orientations. How could anyone ever conclude otherwise?
I guess that solves everything and we can now all agree. Maybe Fukuyama can write a book called “The End of Science.”
Ray in Carolina writes:
This is good, so discerning….thanks for all you do!
Karl D. writes:
You said:
“Why is it that materialists, atheists, secular humanists, Communists, Randians, and Nazis, who all deny the existence of God, are always trying to create a substitute God? I mean, what is their problem??
You don’t strike me as the type who watches “South Park”, but there was a funny episode in which a character travels to the future to find “God is dead” and two factions who worship the new God “science” battle each other for whose science/religion is correct. Here is the name and description of said episode.
Go GoD go
The topic of evolution is introduced to the 4th graders of South Park Elementary and while their teacher is against the theory, a change of mind has implications for the future. And speaking of the future, Cartman is trying to send himself there; to the exact date that the newest video game console, the Nintendo Wii is being released.
CN, a liberal aquaintance, writes:
Not your best outing, if I may be permitted to say. The only way your argument (just barely) progresses is to ascribe to the author arguments you build from his article and then ascribe to him, but which he didn’t make. BTW, is Christopher Potter writing in the NY Post the best possible explanation of what scientists are trying to do with the LHC. [LA replies: Well, I guess I shouldn’t have responded to the actual article before me!]
You depend on the “cute” nickname of the Higgs boson as “The God Particle”. True, many in the press have latched onto the moniker—mostly, I suppose, for its cuteness, not its accuracy. Potter himself reports that the guy who coined it later regretted doing so. [LA replies: It sounds as though your complaint is with Potter and the scientist who coined the name, not with me. The fact is that the scientist chose the name “God particle.” That fact can be criticized. You are criticizing it, yet somehow you think it’s unfair of me to criticize it. ]
With italics, you chide Potter for not having answered where “the light” came from. He didn’t purport to, and his having not answered a question of yours does not mean he failed to address whatever it was he wanted to address. The article doesn’t match the headline, which Potter may not have written. If anything, the headline might have been, “There being light, then what?” [Again, your problem seems to be with Potter, not with me. And obviously, my question about the light, where the universe comes from, is the central question that won’t go away even if this particle were found. Your approach is that of a lawyer, challenging me on the procedural propriety of my points, rather than on their substance.]
I’d be very surprised if any of the scientists working on the LHC think they are trying to answer, “Why is there anything at all,” if by that one means What is the reason that things—anything—started. I suspect they think they are in part of a process trying to answer, “How is there anything at all.” [Apparently you think that the way scientific claims are put before the public should not be discussed, because that is not the “real” science. You don’t seem to have noticed that we don’t just have science today, we have an industry in which various claims are put before the public as established, which aren’t established, as I’ve shown with Darwinism, for example. So obviously, the way that certain notions (“the God particle”) are put before the public is a legitimate issue, much as you wish that it weren’t.]
If you want to discuss the scientists’ reasons for their efforts and the inquiries they’re actually making, it would be more illuminating to quote them, not Mr. Potter. [I can’t believe you’re making such a weak argument. Potter has written a long article in the New York Post. If you think it’s not a good article, complain to him, not to me.]
And why are you surprised that people who don’t subscribe to certain popular evocations of God, don’t wish there to be some sort of supernatural power? There’s a reason for the dearth of atheists in foxholes: it’s comforting to humans to think there’s… something. It is perfectly logical to ask, What made the first thing? (The question may not be motivating or compelling to most folks, but it’s a logical question.) The LHC scientists are asking—if Potter is right—What made mass out of light? Potter points out (but we didn’t need him to tell us) that the progression of nuclear science includes repeated efforts to dig smaller and earlier. If they find the Higgs boson and it seems to perform the role ascribed to it, then scientists may ask, OK, then what made light? If they behave like scientists before them, they will *look for* an answer, they won’t invent one that depends on magic. And in their professional work, I don’t think you’ll find scientists ever asking the question, Why was light made? Dealing with the question of How may make many scientists wonder, outside the lab, about the Whys. That doesn’t mean science is asking Why. [LA replies: I have nothing against research into what happened in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s a question of scientfic research. But what I’m responding to is the way this project is being presented to the public by Potter. He said: “Scientists may be mere weeks away from answering one of the most mysterious questions of existence: Why is there anything at all?” Fine, change the last sentence to “How is there anything at all?”. Either way, it’s a risible claim, and deserves to be ridiculed. You can’t stand the fact that I’m exposing the silliness of it, the exaggerated claims of being on the doorstep of ultimate knowledge that are made on the behalf of science.]
Seems to me scientists are happy to concede they deal in Hows and make no pretense to asking the Whys. Religionists are perfectly free to deal with the Whys. This whole pretended tension between God-bothers and sliderulers is rooted in the former misleadingly saying that the latter’s discoveries give a different answer than their own to the same question. Largely, they don’t. They give their best answer to a different question. It’s perfectly alright for Religionists answers to the Why questions to be whatever they want them to be. They are not bound by logic; magic is a perfectly acceptable answer in a sphere of belief. Just don’t take offense when others don’t share you beliefs, or even if they do share them in other realms of their lives, they don’t apply those beliefs when answering the How questions. [This is sheerest ignorance, to say that science is based only on logic, and that people who believe in God or who question the materialist view of existence are appealing to “magic,” i.e., anyone who doubts that material science supplies all the answers to the universe is irrational, sub-rational. Under cover of your tolerant pose, it is an expression of what has become the standard atheist bigotry against religion. In your biased and unlearned view, thousands of years of Christian and Jewish theological thinking has involved nothing but a belief in “magic.” It is precisely such bigotry and contempt toward religion (not even concealed under your supposed tolerance) that religious believers will no longer tolerate.]
Emily B. wreites:
Perhaps the multiculturalists should add “God Particle” to the litany of names for God when addressing an audience and want to be politically correct! Something tells me that most atheists wouldn’t appreciate the cheeky idea implied that they are no different or better than self-professed theists; we disagree on the nature of, and not whether, a higher power exists.
Laura W. writes:
That would be so much fun if evangelical atheists started going door-to-door. I am prepared to open my home at almost any hour of the day to wandering nihilists. I have great talks with the women who come each month with their copies of The Watchtower, but atheists would offer fresh new horizons for theological discourse in the middle of the day. I guarantee you this. If atheists did become missionaries, believers could actually get at them. The conversion rate would be stupendous.
LA writes:
I said above: “The atheists have become evangels…” I’m not the only one to whom that image has occurred. John D. has just sent me an article by Roger Scruton in which he speaks of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al. as “evangelical atheists.”
Ben W. writes:
Isn’t “science” becoming rather ridiculous? First the idea of multiple universes. Doesn’t “universe” mean one cosmos—uni?
Now the God particle. Finding this particle means understanding how all life arose? Isn’t that akin to finding a grain of sand on the beach and asserting the whole beach arose from that one grain of sand?
Why is there an endless stream of particles anyway? I thought that the atom was it! Then we got the electron and the proton. And from there we got even more basic particles. Doesn’t it seem as if this search for the most elemental particle has become an infinite regress—the thing atheists accuse us of?
BTW whatever happened to strings? I thought they had become the most basic stuff of existence—not other particles. So now we’re back to particles?
And what are particles anyway? Infinitesimally small yet perfectly rounded balls of what? Of what is their whatness composed, what what? The Higgs boson particle is made of what?
Appears as if physics is going down the same road as Darwinism. Darwinism needs eons and eons and eons and eons of time. Physics requires smaller and smaller and smaller particles. Each discipline requires larger or smaller quantities that no one can verify.
LA replies:
No matter how many sub-sub-sub particles it finds or hypothesizes, no matter how close it gets to an answer, physics will never be able to explain matter/energy, because, ultimately, matter/energy comes from something that is not itself, and physics cannot “see” that which is not matter/energy.
No specialized knowledge is needed for me to make that statement. It is a corollary of the universally accepted idea that the universe began with the Big Bang. If the Big Bang happened, then the matter/energy that erupted into existence in the Big Bang came out of something that is not matter/energy, and therefore physics, which can only “see” matter-energy, cannot explain the origin of matter/energy. Period. End of subject.
Concerning three realities,—the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, and the existence of consciousness—we can say with absolute assurance—as a self-evident, definitional statement—that material science will NEVER be able to explain them, because they lie beyond the bounds of matter.
March 2
Sage McLaughlin writes:
The issue on the “God particle” article is very uncomplicated—you have in Potter someone who is forehead-slappingly ignorant of what the Cosmological Question is really all about, and has obviously never put a single moment’s thought into the nature of scientific knowledge. He therefore has no business writing any such article in the first place. [LA replies: Potter has written a book, the article was evidently taken from the book.]
It leaps out of your exchange with CN—he obviously agrees with everything that you wrote and, true to liberal form, he is down to complaining that the truth you speak should go unspoken. This is a man whose mind is trained in the ways of political correctness and can instantly recognize an unmentionable truth, namely, that science does not answer the most important questions we face. His instinct is to attack the truth-speaker, rather than the person disseminating obvious falsehoods. He objects that “in their professional work, I don’t think you’ll find scientists ever asking the question, Why was light made? Dealing with the question of How may make many scientists wonder, outside the lab, about the Whys. That doesn’t mean science is asking Why.” Which is exactly your point! He then asserts that those who do ask why are engaged in an irrational, and one assumes dangerous, enterprise.
So it is he, and not you, who has decided that sane, rational people must not engage in certain kinds of inquiry. Whether it is the question of extended kinship and intelligence, the endocrinologist’s study of sex hormones and behavior, or more metaphysical questions such as the nature of God and the transcendent, one finds that it is the left whose project it is to narrow and forestall the range of human inquiry. In the name of “free thought” and “open-mindedness,” they not only attack those who are willing to speak obvious truths, they seek to place beyond the pale of reasonable discourse whole categories of human thought. Those questions are above our pay grade, to quote one prominent leftist you may know.
It is as Chesterton said: Their materialism does not make them “free” to deny God’s existence. Rather, their materialism does not permit them to consider the question at all. Always, their inclination is to silence, to narrow, to preclude, to reduce—just as with Orwell’s professional word-destroyers in the Ministry of Truth. And always, they protest that they are engaged in a project of expanding human consciousness and expression. CN’s immediate inclination to go on the offensive against you, when the bulk of his entire message should have been sent to Potter, indicates where the leftist approach truly tends.
Tim W. writes:
It was just an impression I got from reading Potter’s article. He seemed to be implying a generic liberal equality, as in the following passages:
“Science insists on our commonality. DNA analysis shows us that everyone alive today shares a mother who lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. Our DNA also shows us that we are descended not just from apes but from slime, a story that takes our descent back some 3 billion years.”
“The story of science as we understand it today can now trace our descent—and the descent of all things—back to the origins of the universe. Surely that makes science the greatest story ever told. In a world filled with divisiveness of all kinds, how wonderful to be reminded that we are all in this together.”
Maybe I read him wrong, but it sounded like a lot of borderless world blather to me.
LA replies:
That’s why I pointed out how he was using science, in a very silly way, for quasi religious purposes. We’re all in this together and should overcome our mutual divisiveness, because we’re all descended from slime.
Leonard D. writes:
I disagree with this statement:
Concerning three realities,—the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, and the existence of consciousness—we can say with absolute assurance—as a self-evident, definitional statement—that material science will NEVER be able to explain them, because they lie beyond the bounds of matter.
Only the beginning of the universe lies beyond the bounds of matter. The beginning of life and of consciousness both happened within our universe. Now, both of these were historical events with nobody there to record them. So they lie beyond our ken, ultimately, because they were results of random events, and we can never know for certain exactly what happened. But that is no different than most other past events.
But they did happen within our material universe. There’s no reason why a scientist cannot create life in a lab, at least according to science. Ditto for consciousness. Anything that has been done once can be done again.
While it might also be possible to create a universe in a lab, that cannot be informative about the historical big bang in the same way as creating life would. Exactly because, as you say, the big bang happened from “outside” where we are. We don’t know and cannot know what rules applied “out there”.
LA replies:
Leonard’s argument contains a series of spectacularly unwarranted materialist and reductionist assumptions that assure a materialist outcome.
He writes:
“The beginning of life and of consciousness … were results of random events”
But the whole point is that we don’t know how the universe and life began; yet Leonard somehow knows that they were random events. How does he know this? Because he’s starting off with the assumption that the materialist view of the universe—the view that only the material exists—is correct. He thus “proves” that the materialist view of the universe is correct, by assuming that it is correct.
Leonard writes: “There’s no reason why a scientist cannot create life in a lab, at least according to science. Ditto for consciousness. Anything that has been done once can be done again.”
There’s no reason a scientist cannot create life in a lab? How does Leonard know this? It’s pure assertion, not supported by anything. And if there’s no reason it can’t be done, why has it never been done, despite many efforts to do it?
And there’s no reason a scientist cannot create consciousness in a lab? What planet is Leonard living on?
Then he writes:
“and we can never know for certain exactly [when life and consciousness began]. But that is no different than most other past events.”
So the beginning of life and the beginning of consciousness are the same as other past events. Why? Because we can never know exactly what happened. This is rank reductionism, taking one aspect that different things have in common and saying that they are the same because of that one aspect. So for example, people argue that Islam believes in one God, and that Christianity believes in One God, and therefore Islam and Christianity are essentially the same and ought to be able to get along!
To put the question of the beginning of life and consciousness on the same level as all past events that we can’t know about is fallacious. Obviously, the beginning of life is a different order of phenomenon from, say, the development of a different shaped beak among a certain species of Galapagos finch, or how many hours Julius Caesar slept the night before he crossed from Gaul to Britain. Yet in all three instances we can’t know exactly what happened.
Then there’s Leonard’s statement, “But [the beginning of life and of consciousness] did happen within our material universe.” From which he concludes that they are material events.
It appears that Leonard is entirely unpersuaded by our many recent discussions about consciousness. Obviously, our bodies are located in the material universe. But consciousness, whatever it is, is not material. Indeed, by definition consciousness is not material: it can’t be seen or touched by the senses, nor detected by any scientific instrument. Scientific instruments detect electric currents moving through the neurons in the brain, they detect thousands-of-times-per-second changes in the electro-chemical balance of each neuron allowing a nervous impulse to be transmitted. But no scientific instrument has ever “seen” consciousness. So the fact that something is located in (or rather somehow experienced in) the material universe does not make it material.
As for the beginning of life, non-living matter cannot form itself into life—an event, said Fred Hoyle, which would be like a hurricane blowing through a junk yard and producing a Boeing 747. Something other than matter had to enter the picture in order to produce life. When an organism dies, its materiality is still there, but its life is gone. So life is not matter. It is something beyond matter. It is of a different order from matter, even though it expresses itself through matter, just as consciousness is of a different order from matter, though it expresses itself through matter.
LA continues:
By way of clarifying the point that consciousness is not material, even if, as Leonard says, we, along with our consciousness, are “located” in the material world, here is the beginning of P.D. Ouspensky’s important and exciting book (which I first read when I was twenty) Tertium Organum. At the outset, Ouspensky establishes the two primary and incontestable facts of existence: the external world, and consciousness.
THE most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.
Therefore, desiring to know anything, we shall before all else determine WHAT we accept as given, and WHAT as demanding definition and proof; that is, determine WHAT we know already, and WHAT we wish to know.
[…]
But what do we know?
We know that with the very first awakening of knowledge, man is confronted with two obvious facts:
The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.
Neither of these can he prove or disprove, but they are facts: they constitute reality for him.
It is possible to meditate upon the mutual correlation of these two facts. It is possible to try to reduce them to one; that is, to regard the psychic or inner world as a part, reflection, or function of the world, or the world as a part, reflection, or function of that inner world. But such a procedure constitutes a departure from facts, and all such considerations of the world and of the self, to the ordinary non-philosophical mind, will not have the character of obviousness. On the contrary the sole obvious fact remains the antithesis of I and Not-I—our inner psychic life and the outer world.,
Further on we shall return to this fundamental thesis. But thus far we have no basis on which to found a contradiction of the obvious fact of the existence of ourselves—i.e., of our inner life—and of the world in which we live. This we shall therefore accept as the given.
This however is the only thing that we have the right to accept as given: all the rest demands proof and definition in terms of these two given data.
A. Zarkov writes:
The phrase “the God particle” is simply a journalistic metaphor for something called the “Higgs Boson.” The detection or non-detection the Higgs Boson has no theological implications. One can be religious or non-religious and live comfortably with or without the existence of Higgs boson. Science deals with the “how” and not the “why.” Physics is essentially a study of transformations—if this then that. One can put various philosophical interpretations on physical theories, but it all comes down to being able to predict the outcomes of experiments.
The world of quantum physics is a strange one. One would think that a vacuum is pure nothing, but that’s wrong. There is something called “vacuum energy” (see Wikipedia) that comes out of the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Energy can be created and destroyed on short time scales. A particle and an anti-particle come into existence, annihilate each other and then disappear. However they interact and cause measurable effects such as the small forces in the Casmir effect. Now the spontaneous creation of something out of nothing sounds very mysterious, but physicists don’t try to explain the “why” of vacuum energy, you just assume it exists and make predictions. If the predictions pan out then you might have a good theory. That’s it—don’t look for deep meanings about the nature of human existence because that’s outside the realm of the subject.
The Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field. There are lots of fields in physics such as electromagnetism and gravitation. The Higgs field is something that is supposed to exist in the vacuum and have a non-zero mean value unlike vacuum energy. If we discover the Higgs boson then the Higgs field exists and permeates the universe and would further confirm the Standard Model in physics. Thus the name “God particle.” The existence of Higgs field would have implications for physics on a cosmological scale. But again this has no theological ramifications. No one is going to prove or disprove anything about a supreme being on the basis of the Higgs field.
LA replies:
All well and good. Let me repeat that it was not the search for the Higgs boson that I was replying to, but the claims that Christopher Potter made for it.
Leonard D. writes:
It is tiresome to write, “According to science, X is true,”, all the time. Or, to make it clear that I am not asking for your agreement, “According to (and limited to) science, which is materialist in its methodology, X is true.” And I do not always do so. However, you may assume it with me, for I am, as you correctly infer, a base materialist.
You have a specific error in attributing to me the idea that the universe arose from a random event. I only believe that is true of life, and of consciousness. My previous letter was specifically making the distinction between these two classes of events in terms of how they appear, according to (and limited to) science, which is materialist in its methodology.
As for how I know these things, you are right. But there is no circularity in my ontology. I don’t make any claim that such knowledge justifies being a materialist. Au contraire: I acknowledge that materialism is prior to science, and indeed prior to much of my knowledge. Materialism is, if you will, a form of secular faith. But this is not exceptional; ultimately, nobody can know anything without faith. (If using the word “faith” seems too religious to you, what I mean can equally be called “unsupported belief”, or “personal axioms”.) [LA replies: but it is circular; you have just underscored the circularity.]
Yes, I believe that consciousness and life are purely material phenomena. (As for whether consciousness is by definition non-material, I refer the fairminded reader to the wikipedia page on it.) It seems to me that you are confusing highly complex information—that is, rare or unique arrangements of matter—with nonmateriality. When a living thing dies, you see a soul fleeing; I see entropy. When you say no scientist has ever “seen” consciousness, I find that roughly as compelling as the claim that no electrical engineer has ever “seen” a CPU in a computer playing I-tunes.
LA replies:
Be serious. By “see” consciousness, I meant one of the two basic tests for the real existence of something according to materialist science: (1) we sense it directly with our senses, or (2) we detect it via instruments and experimentation. For example, we can’t see the curvature of space, but an experiment proved correct Einstein’s theory that space is curved. Science sees human behavior and speech with the senses; it detects electrochemical events in the brain when a person is cerebrating; but it has never seen or detected consciousness.
Second, for a person to deny the self-evident non-materiality of his own consciousness suggests a radical self-alienation; it is impossible to take such a denial seriously. Consciousness, thought, is by definition non-material. For example, the thought, “That is a chair,” or “That chair is green,” is different from the chair; it is a different order of existent from the chair. The chair is a material thing. A thought about a material thing cannot itself be material. It is something different from matter. Thus to insist that one’s consciousness is material is tantamount to denying that one has a consciousness. Further, as Ouspensky showed, the two certain facts we start with—the two facts that are the basis of all subsequent thought, experience and discussion—are the existence of the external, material world, and the existence of our inner psychic life through which we are aware of the external, material world. Therefore a person who denies the reality of his own psychic life has disqualified himself from participating in discussion, since he has denied the possibility of his forming thoughts about the world, in much the same way that a post-modernist who says that there is no truth has disqualified himself from participating in discussion, since he has denied the possibility that anything he says is true..
Alan Roebuck writes:
In “Searching for the God Particle,” you have pointed out that consciousness is a primary, self-evidently non material, reality.
Not only are the materialists denying the obvious, but Leonard and his peers are engaging in a textbook case of circular reasoning:
Nobody disputes that human consciousness involves matter (although God’s does not). What defines Leonard’s position is the assertion that consciousness involves only matter.
And how could the materialist know that only matter is involved? He would say it is because there is no evidence that more than matter is involved. [LA replies: Leonard doesn’t feel he has to prove it; he says it’s a matter of faith!]
Let’s leave aside for the moment the problem that materialists define “evidence” to suit the conclusion they want to reach, in which case they dismiss all evidence for God and the supernatural as invalid by definition. The lack of evidence for a non-material consciousness cannot prove that it does not exist, because we may not yet be in possession of that evidence. Lack of evidence for the existence of X never proves that X does not exist. The only way to prove that X does not exist is to show that the existence of X contradicts an established fact. But just what established fact is contradicted by the existence of a non-material consciousness?
There can be only one possible answer: The “fact” that materialism is true.
And how does Leonard know that materialism is true? [LA replies: He doeson’t say he knows it, he says he believes it, by faith.] Again, since materialism is a purely negative doctrine (no non-material things exist), lack of evidence against it cannot prove it: maybe we have not yet detected a non-material thing. The only way to prove naturalism would be if the falsity of naturalism were to contradict an established fact. But no such fact exists.
The only thing that can make it reasonable to believe in naturalism is the belief that material explanations of things are always more plausible than non-material explanations. And Leonard always finds the non-material explanation to be more plausible.
But many things seem to require a non-material reality as their explanation. So why does Leonard find materialistic explanations to be more plausible? Because he is inclined to prefer materialism.
In summary, the reason Leonard believes that the materialist explanation for everything (including consciousness) is better is that he is a materialist, and the reason he is a materialist is because he believes that the materialist explanation is always better.
Or, in other words, on the issue of consciousness, Leonard arrives at his position by ignoring the basic evidence presented by his own consciousness, and by reasoning circularly as indicated above
That being the case, we have no obligation to take him seriously on this point.
March 4
Leonard D. replies to LA:
You wrote:
“I meant one of the tests for the real existence of something according to materialist science: (1) we sense it with our senses, or (2) we detect it via instruments and experimentation.”
We can do these things for consciousness, although I suppose you may not admit introspection as science. Nonetheless, IMO if people universally self-report a phenomenon, that is evidence. But partly I think our disagreement here may have to do with our definitions of consciousness. What do you mean by it? I mean, and I am being rough here, the ability to form ideas beyond direct sense-impressions; having a “life of the mind.” We can detect that, simply by talking to other people, and determining that yes, they have all kinds of ideas, including those unrelated to their exterior environment. They think of things we have not. This does not take any education to do; it is what we all learn when we are toddlers. [LA replies: You are mixing up two different things. I am of course not doubting the existence of consciousness. I am speaking of materialist, positivist science’s test for the existence of consciousness. According to positivism, the fact that we see other people speak and behave is not proof of consciousness; they could be puppets of nervous impulses. To say that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of a material process, which the positivists and the Skinnerite behavioralists say (and which you say, below), is to say that consciousness, as consciousness, does not exist.]
But we also do have the ability, as you said, to look at the low level implementation of ourselves, in terms of what our brain is doing. There is all kinds of evidence of various kinds of impairment to consciousness being caused by physical damage in the brain. This is certainly scientific evidence for consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain activity. Similarly, there is evidence that thought causes various changes in the brain. So, consciousness affects brains. [LA replies: if you remove a transistor from a TV set, and the video image is lost, does that mean that the video image was the result of—was an epiphenomenon of—the transistor? No. The images came from elsewhere, not from the transistor, but from electromagnetic waves we cannot see. The transistor is the physical vehicle for an image that comes from another dimension of reality; the transistor is not the source of the image. Similarly, the fact that consciousness is lost as a result of physical damage to or surgical removal of certain parts of the brain does not show that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain cells.]
These data are easily explained by the materialist position. (Indeed if such links were not found, that would tend to disprove materialist consciousness.) It seems to me that they should be challenging to your position. If there really is something transcendent about consciousness, why can even simple forms of physical damage (i.e. a blow to the head; a lesion in certain parts of the brain) affect it? It seems to me that this requires some kind of two-tiered system, where consciousness is partly mechanical and partly transcendent, with some sort of transcendent linkage between the two. [LA replies: Again you’re not seeing the difference between the brain as a necessary material conduit and organ of consciousness, and consciousness itself, which is (by its very nature) non-material.]
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 01, 2009 09:44 AM | Send
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