John Cleese explains materialist brain science

John Cleese finds a gene "that make some people believe that every piece of human behavior can be explained away mechanically"and a gene "that makes you want to punch people in the head when they take the scientific process and subject it to their pathological literal-mindedness."

'Cheryl' wants to Expel me...

Commentors on atheist blogs often provide the clearest insight into atheist nastiness. Here's a snippet from one "Cheryl", a dyspeptic materialist commenting on my observation that materialist theories of the mind are gibberish and not the least consistent with neuroscience.

Cheryl:

If [Egnor] weren’t a practicing neurosurgeon, I’d have compassion for him. But as it is, I’m appalled he’s still licensed to practice medicine.

Now please understand that all I've done to incur Cheryl's compassionless wrath is to disagree with her. I present evidence that materialism is an inadequate theory of the mind. That has enraged Cheryl so much that she objects to the fact that I'm licensed to practice medicine.

She presents no evidence that I'm unqualified to practice, or that I'm an incompetent surgeon, or that my patient outcomes are anything but good. Actually, I'm a tenured professor of neurosurgery and vice-chairman of my department. I'm an active scientist and educator, and have a good surgical practice.

Nothing objective about my qualifications would lead Cheryl to be 'appalled' that I'm still licensed to practice medicine. She just despises me, apparently, because I question her ideology. That is, she's appalled that I haven't lost my livelihood merely because I don't accept materialism.

Is the practice of medicine dependent on acceptance of doctrinaire materialism? Does science presuppose hard materialism?

Well, I'm in no danger of losing my career, despite the fact that I piss off materialists. But imagine if I were a graduate student in biology, or a young post-doc, or an assistant professor and didn't have tenure or seniority or a long track record of accomplishment to protect my livelihood. I would be in  significant professional peril for not towing the materialist line.

The scientific world is full of little brownshirts like Cheryl. If you tow the line-- if you pay lip service to materialism-- you have a job. I have friends who are biologists-- several quite accomplished scientists-- who don't believe the materialist cr*p for a minute. But they stay silent. As one told me: "I gotta feed my family, Mike, and if I spoke out, I'd never get a job or a grant again"

Unless you're bullet-proof, you've got to be careful in science, especially in biology. There are a lot of Cheryls out there. A lot of them have titles like 'chairman' or 'grant reviewer' or 'journal editor' or are just colleagues who can make your life hell. There is an ideological ticket that you gotta get punched, and if you don't get in line, well... they'll find a way to.. um... Expel you.

Thanks, Cheryl, for making it so clear.

Professor Kleiner on Neurobabble and Aristotle

Professor Harrison Kleiner at Philosophy@Utah State has a nice post about Neurobabble and Aristotle:

“Neurobabble” is the excited talk of a certain kind of materialist who takes every new discovery in neuroscience to be a demonstration of the the mind’s reducibility to the neural processes.

I'll post more on Neurobabble in time. It is the conflation of levels of explanation in science. It assumes that the identification of a material correlation with a mental act provides a significantly deeper understanding of that act, and even that the correlation between material process and mental act demonstrates the reducibility of the mental act to the material process. 


Neurobabble is analogous to asserting that a chemical analysis of the ink used to publish a book containing the play Hamlet provides insight into Shakespeare's meaning. Materialists (like Steven Novella) take it even one step further: they assert (by analogy) that the chemical analysis of the ink would provide a complete explanation for Shakespeare, without remainder. 


The fallacy is obvious.


Kleiner notes that, unlike materialism, Thomistic dualism provides a rich conceptual framework for the philosophical and neuroscientific understanding of the brain/mind relation without the materialistic or Cartesian dualist fallacies:

Since the Aristotelian-Thomist position requires bodily activity as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for acts of the human intellect, the A-T gladly accepts the findings of modern neuro-science, “not as a reluctant concession forced on the theory by the successes of modern neuroscience, but, on the contrary, precisely as a prediction of the A-T position as it has been understood from the beginning.  Were Aristotle and Aquinas to be made familiar with the sorts of neuroscientific discoveries frantically trumpeted by materialists as if they should be an embarrassment to the dualist, they would respond, with a shrug: “Of course.  Told you so.””

[Philosopher Ed] Feser concludes, “The fact is that Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphic dualism is the theory most clearly consistent with all of the philosophical and neuroscientific evidence.”

The materialist view of nature is an impoverished philosophical error. It stems from atheist dogmatism. Nowhere is the inadequacy of that feeble worldview more obvious than it is in the understanding of the mind-brain relation.

My reply to Dr. Novella: part 3

Continuing with my critique of Dr. Novella's dogmatic materialism: (Novella in regular font in blockquotes. Me in italics in blockquotes)

It gets worse...:

Changing the brain’s function (with drugs, electrical or magnetic stimulation, or other methods) will change mental function.

Sometimes yes, most times no. There are all sorts of induced changes in brain function that have no effect whatsoever on mental function. I’ve had MEP stimulation as an experimental subject, and while it made my arm twitch, it had no effect on my mental function. Magnetic fields change brain states, without necessarily changing mental states. Anti-epileptic drugs change brain states, and often do not change mental states (they are often well-tolerated by patients). Some seizures change brain states on EEG without discernible changes in mental states (so-called occult electrographic seizures).

This is a similar “resolution” confusion to what Egnor made above – and again he entirely misses the point. I could summarize what he is saying as this: if you change the brain a lot, you change the mental state a lot. If you change the brain a little, you change the mental state a little, and it may too subtle to be obvious or even notice. 

Brain states are changed constantly by innumerable things-- electromagnetic fields, medications, etc. Novella claims that 'every single prediction of materialism-- such as changing brain function will change mental function-- is verified by neuroscience.'


My assertion is simple: not every change in brain state causes a change in mental state. This may be a consequence of the limitations of our science, or it may be a consequence of the actual relationship between brains states and mental states, or it may be a combination of the two.

But Novella commits himself to an absolute claim-- that all mental states are caused entirely by material brain states. The fact that many changes in brain states do not cause a change in mental states counts against his claim.

...He next argues that antiepilepsy drugs do not always change brain states. So why, in his version of reality, does it sometimes change brain states?

Changes in brain states sometimes, but not always, change mental states because brain states sometimes, but not always, cause mental states. That is a basic prediction of Thomistic dualism. The more basic the level of function, the more intimate the connection between matter and mind. Higher level functions-- intellect and will-- are more loosely connected to brain states, because intellect and will are immaterial acts. They are potentiated and supported by material brain states (perception, imagination, etc), so they will often be affected to some degree by changes in brain states, but they are not intrinsically material.


It's not true that every patient on anti-seizure drugs notices some effect on cognition. Some do, some don't. Dose-related effects on drugs on some aspects of cognition don't prove that the brain is the cause of the mind, without remainder.

Egnor also notes that some seizures do not cause noticeable changes in mental states. Which seizures would those be? Perhaps they are focal seizures that occur only in a small part of the brain, and not a part that would cause obvious signs. 

Many seizures in non-eloquent (cognitive) regions of the brain are clinically silent, and can be detected only by EEG testing. This is evidence against Novella's dogma that the mind is entirely material.

There will be no documentable mental phenomena in the absence of brain function.

I don’t know, and neither does Novella. There have been tens of millions of people (at least) who have had near-death experiences in which they had mental experiences during cardiac asystole and lack of brain perfusion.

If neither of us know, then there aren’t any clearly documented cases.

There are many clearly documented cases of NDE. Whether the documentation amounts to scientific proof of the phenomenon is a matter of opinion (I don't think that the reality of NDE's has been 'proven', but the evidence is substantial).

If there were – we would know. Egnor here is using speculative and controversial claims as a premise – not exactly solid ground. I have written about NDE before and won’t repeat it here. I argue that the evidence does not support the conclusion of mental activity without brain activity. Egnor, however, is intent on repeating his non sequitur and following up with a straw man.

I am pointing out the obvious: Novella's assertion that "there will be no documentable mental phenomena in the absence of brain function" is refuted by documented NDE's. There is a lot room for differences of opinion here, but Novella's dogmatic assertion is not in any way verified by the evidence.

I don’t know if any of these are real. Neither does Novella. But his statement that there are “no documentable mental phenomena in the absence of brain function.” is rank b.s. There are tens of millions of people who’ve had these experiences, and many have been documented and corroborated.

Are they all nuts? Are they all lying? Are they all deluded? Dr. Novella thinks so, but his opinion is based on his bias, not on any evidence.

Again – if we don’t know whether or not they are real, then they are not evidence – not documentable phenomena.

Of course they're evidence. Evidence comes in all sorts of degrees of credibility. But there is massive evidence for the reality of NDE's, most notably with corroborated NDE's (NDE's in which people know things that they could not have known through ordinary means).

I also never stated and do not believe that all patients who experienced an NDE are “nuts,” “lying,” or “deluded.” I think they had profound experiences during a life-threatening event. I just further think that these experiences can be explained as brain experiences, the effects of hypoxemia and hypercapnea mixed with memories from the period of recovery.

Novella invokes theories to dismiss the experiences of millions of people. His evidence is minimal (and he provides none), and he provides no evidence for corroborated NDE's.

Again, rather than take the scientific approach that NDE's are widespread phenomena that are so far inadequately explained except as genuine (in some cases), he invokes materialistic dogma and dismisses out of hand the massive evidence for the reality of NDE's.

When the brain dies, mental function ends.

Ditto. If Novella has scientific evidence proving that there is no afterlife, I’d love to see it.

This is an attempt to shift the burden of evidence. I also further never said that I can prove there is no afterlife.

Yes. You. Did. That's the point of your assertion:  "When the brain dies, mental function ends." You claim that this conclusion is validated by neuroscience.

You are wrong, for two reasons:

1) Neuroscience has little traction on such metaphysical questions.

2) To the extent that neuroscience can address the afterlife, there have been millions of NDE experiences that at least suggest the existence of an afterlife. There are theories both ways, but you grossly misrepresent the science when you assert that your statement "when the brain dies, mental function ends." is in anyway validated or settled by science. It is not. The question remains wide open, with a large amount of evidence favoring the reality of an afterlife.

My position is that there is no evidence for an afterlife, nor is there any evidence for mental activity in the absence of brain activity. If Egnor thinks he has such evidence, I’d love to see it.

Millions of people have had NDE's, and upwards of 20% are corroborated, meaning that there are independent checks on the experiences of the person that support the reality of the NDE. That is evidence. It is not randomized controlled evidence, so it may not be true. But it is massive, and materialist dogma won't make it go away.

Egnor finishes up with a typical rant, partly writing:

As for Novella, his “proofs” are a tangled mess of scientific/ideological assertions that actually make the case opposite the one he thinks they do… if they are to be taken seriously at all, which they shouldn’t be.

Several of his claims, coming from a practicing neurologist, are simply lies.

He keeps putting the word “proofs” in quotation marks. That implies that I used the word “proof” when writing about it. I didn’t (at least not in the article he links to)- I used the phrase “clearly establishes” which I stand by.

Same damn thing. Same overt misrepresentation of the science.

In any case – he follows with pure ad hominem fantasy. I will let the reader decide who is making unsupported ideological assertions, and who is being loose with the facts

Let the reader decide: is the mind-brain problem solved, or not?
________________________________________________________________________


So let's sum up at this stage of the debate.

It is important to  understand that this debate is about Novella's assertions, not about the broader issue of understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain. Novella is asserting that the debate over. He asserts that neuroscience "clearly establishes" the truth of materialism.

My reply is that the relationship between the mind and the brain is primarily a logical question, not an empirical question. Neuroscience can be interpreted any number of ways. The profound philosophical questions-- how do we account for intentionality, for qualia, for subjective experience, for Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, for the explanatory gap, for personal identity, for free will, for incorrigibility, for restricted access, which are all profound technical issues in philosophy of the mind-- are not answered and will not be answered by half-educated doctrinaire materialists who are innocent of the actual issues in the mind-brain problem.

It is perhaps the deepest problem in modern philosophy, and it will not be answered in the Journal of Neuroscience. Anyone stupid enough to believe that it will be answered by science-- let alone that it has been answered-- has no role in the real debate.

I have noted that I believe that the Aristotelian-Thomist hylemorphic framework- Thomistic dualism-- is the most satisfactory philosophical framework to understand the mind and the brain. Philosophers of the mind have many perspectives, ranging from dualism of various sorts (Cartesian, property, epiphenominal, functional, hylemorphic) to variants of materialism (eliminative, identity, behaviorist). Hard materialism of the eliminative and identity type is increasingly a minority perspective, well on it's way to becoming a fringe, for the obvious reason that the mind is not material.

Novella is, of course oblivious to all this. He's dogmatic, and has a materialist point to prove. It's worth noting that even informed materialists don't usually try to base their arguments on empirical neuroscience. They understand that the issue in the mind-brain problem is philosophical, not empirical.

Let's return to Novella's claims, and deal with them on his own terms. He makes two broad and quite extreme assertions, both outside the bounds of serious thinkers on the mind-brain problem:

1) Every single prediction of materialism has been verified by neuroscience.

I reply:

It is not true of any scientific theory, and it is certainly not true of materialism and neuroscience. Novella asserts that every mental state is reducible completely to a brain state. In fact, there has not been even one reduction of a specific mental state (a thought) to a brain state-- even incompletely-- in a hundred years of neuroscience. No serious thinker on this issue-- even passionate materialists-- asserts that every single prediction of materialism has been validated by neuroscience.

Novella's claim that 'every prediction of materialism is verified' is delusional.

2) Each of six materialist theories about the mind-brain relationship has been "clearly established" by neuroscience.

I have pointed out that for higher thought-- intellect, judgement, will-- there is--again-- not one complete reduction of mental to material for any specific thought.  Not one. Many materialists believe that the causal arrow from brain to mind is true, but no serious thinker on this issue claims that materialism has been "clearly established" by neuroscience.

Novella admits:

"We do not yet have a detailed enough model of the brain nor the ability to measure brain activity with sufficient resolution or calibration to come anywhere near such a task."

What more needs to be said?

'Marshal' regrets that I exist

Debating materialists/atheists is amusing. A commentor on Steven Novella's blog is quite exasperated with my persistent resistance to the (waning) tide of materialism in the mind-body debate.

Marshall:

Dr. Novella, this sounds unbelievably frustrating. It’s a shame that people like this exist–

Well, Marshall, there is eternal life, so you're stuck with my existence for quite a long time.

...people who are so tied to their beliefs that they will resort to nearly ANYTHING to make their case–even if it requires ignoring evidence and logic to such an extent that it makes them appear to have the cognitive capacity of a first grader.

If we ignore evidence and logic, why do you guys always seem to lose the debates?

I go through cycles of “giving up” on these people, to “trying to make a difference.”

Do keep trying.

Convincing individuals that they’re wrong rarely works, especially through argumentation, and it really only ends up making my blood broil.

Materialists are so modern that their blood doesn't boil. It broils.

Do you really think that, if you presented an unbelievably clear, evidence-supported, logical argument that left absolutely no trace of uncertainty to you conclusion, that Egnor would say, “Hi Dr. Novella–you’re absolutely right, and I’ve been wrong this whole time. I’ll change my stance on dualism because I’m obviously wrong.”? Not in a million years!

Try the argument, and see. I'm an open-minded guy.

I understand that these people serve as good examples for the general public of how the mind can be so easily deluded by belief, and the truth shrouded.

Actually, Marshall, the public agrees with me. They're not educated enough to believe something as stupid as materialism.

Examples serve to make good educational points, and I’m glad you continue to do what you do. But it’s SO HARD to not to just get angry with these people for being so goddamn STUPID,

Marshall gets so mad he keeps accidently hitting the 'caps lock' key.

and it’s difficult not to resort to their level of ad homine and baseless insults–that’s what our emotional brains are driving us to do.

So I'm debating Marshall's brain. I've never debated a brain before. How does it type?

It takes strength to rise above this tendency.

Materialists have to stay strong, for all of us.

But still, it’s so FRUSTRATING.

That's right, Marshall. Some of us won't roll over. Peddling materialism ain't easy, especially when the customers keep asking questions. If only Christians would just shut up and applaud...

John Cleese explains the materialistic theory of of the mind

Now I understand it!

My reply to Dr. Novella, part 2

The continuation of my critique of Steven Novella's post about materialism and the mind-brain relation: (Novella in regular type. His quotation of me in italics)

[Egnor] continues:

What does Novella mean by “brain maturity”? Mylenation? If so, then there is a vague correlation. Babies are immature, and their brains are incompletely mylenated. What else could he mean by “brain maturity”? Size? Dendritic complexity? Anatomical (gyral) complexity? None of those brain states correlates in any reliable way with mental and emotional maturity. There are mentally/emotionally mature people with brains of all sizes and shapes and structures. There isn’t the least bit of correlation.

Gross disease states can correlate, somewhat. A patient with advanced Alzheimers will have brain changes at autopsy that would lead the pathologist to predict that the patient was “immature” in behavior. But aside from gross obvious brain pathology, there is no consistent correlation.

Contra Novella, you can’t do an MRI of your prospective spouse to determine how mature/immature he/she is.

I honestly have no idea what Novella means by “brain maturity will correlate with mental and emotional maturity.”

It’s just a stupid assertion.

Egnor’s lack of understanding is not an actual argument, even though he confuses it for one.  Here I am not talking about personality, 

I am talking about personality. Novella makes a bizarre claim: that every mental act is explainable in full by a strictly material brain state-- that the 'brain causes the mind, without remainder'.

Personality involves maturity, in the sense of judgement, self-discipline, etc. maturity. There's no question that brain states sometimes correlate very loosely with maturity-- teens act immaturely at times-- that is not what Novella is claiming. Novella claims that all mental states ontologically reduce to material brain states, without remainder, and that science demonstrates this to be true beyond dispute.


That claim is delusional.


The fact remains that most of what we would consider mature traits-- honesty, acceptance of responsibility, planning ahead-- have no specific correlation with a brain state as yet determined by science. Now perhaps some day a correlation will be found-- your 'planning ahead' will be found to correlate in a specific way with the level of dopamine exceeding 13.4 picograms in your subthalamic nucleus or such-- but today no such correlation has been demonstrated. And since Novella claims that all mental states are caused completely by material brain states, this counts against his hypothesis. The number of different thoughts you can have is essentially infinite, and since not a single thought has ever been shown to be caused by a specific brain state, that data against Novella's unhinged assertion that 'every single prediction of materialism has been verified by neuroscience' is essentially infinite as well.

but the development of the brain as we grow and the fact that this brain development correlates with neurological maturity. The most obvious example is the brain of a baby or child. Babies act like babies because they have a baby’s brain – it’s not just the lack of worldly experience.

Novella is incoherent. His assertion is that all mental function is brain function, period. According to his hard materialism, the only reason a baby would or could do or think anything is because he has a baby brain, because the brain causes the mind, without remainder. So forget "lack of worldly experience" as a cause for immature behavior. It's all brain, folks.

One gets the impression that even Novella can't take dogmatic materialism seriously.

As parts of their brain mature (developmentally speaking) then they gain new abilities. They cannot walk until their cerebellum develops sufficiently.

Walking involves all sorts of neurological functions. This, of course, proves materialism.

Novella:

I was also referring to research into the teen brain. Scientists followed children over years and imaged their brains while doing specific tasks. This is what they found:

Another series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard’s McLean Hospital scanned subjects’ brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen.⁵ Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other “gut” reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.

In other words, teens act differently than adults partly because their brains function differently. Their emotional immaturity correlates with functional immaturity in the brain – it’s not just lack of life experience.

Correlation between mental states and fMRI does not provide an arrow of causation. Novella provides no evidence teasing out the question: how much of the change in teen brain function with maturity is caused by the teens' mental states (more experience, etc) rather than the other way around.

Does mental state cause brain state? Does brain state cause mental state? Is the reality a blend of the two?

Novella's dogmatic materialism leaves him only one option: all mental states are caused completely by material brain states. This fMRI study does nothing to support the materialist assertion. It merely demonstrates correlation, without demonstrating the arrow of causality.

Does Novella even know how to evaluate a research study?

He makes an even deeper logical error. Novella again makes the same gaffe with the teens as he made about the babies' maturity. He asserts that teens are teens "partly because their brains function differently... it's not just lack of experience."

!

Notice that Novella has no option for invoking "partly" and "not just" brain function. According to his materialism, it's all brain function, because the brain causes the mind, period.

Novella isn't even coherent. His theory is so idiotic that even he can't accept it fully.

More to come...