No free will,no civil liberty?

Free Will Denial and PreCrimes
Michael Egnor

Tamler Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston who blogs at Naturalism.Org,  argues that we don’t really have free will, and that giving up the idea of moral responsibility would be beneficial to society:

[T]he idea that criminals do not morally deserve punishment is tough to accept… In fact, giving up on the idea of deep moral responsibility has no … anarchical or distressing consequences. Let’s suppose we did start viewing terrible crimes as we do natural disasters. Would this mean we would not try to prevent future crimes?  Of course not, no more than it would suggest that we not tape our windows or retrofit buildings to protect ourselves from hurricanes and earthquakes. It would mean only that we cease to relentlessly blame criminals (or political figures) for their behavior.

Sommers inadvertently points out the most dangerous consequence of the denial of free will. If we deny free will and treat criminals as we would treat natural disasters, then preemption of crime becomes the logical goal, just as preemption of damage from natural disasters is smart public policy. As Sommers candidly admits, we should “try to prevent future crimes.” We tape our windows before hurricanes, reinforce our buildings before earthquakes, and evacuate our trailer parks before tornadoes. We don’t blame hurricanes and earthquakes for the damage they cause, in any moral sense; natural disasters aren’t guilty of anything. They’re just physical events. A consequence of this pragmatic approach is that we preempt the damage caused by natural events. We act before the natural disaster has happened, to mitigate its effects.

If we treat criminals the way we treat natural disasters — as physical events without moral culpability — the pragmatic approach is preemption as well. Why wait for a murderer to commit murder? In order “to prevent future crimes,” by Sommers’s reasoning, we can identify people with a statistical propensity to commit murder (based on race, age, sex, prior behavior, etc.), and incarcerate them before their crime, and prevent the damage.

Of course, Sommers would argue: you should’t incarcerate innocent people for crimes they haven’t committed! But if Sommers is right, and free will is not real, then there are no innocent people, any more than there are guilty people. There is no innocence or guilt at all, because innocence and guilt only have moral meaning if we have free will. If there is no free will and no innocence and guilt, there are just natural systems (us) doing what natural systems do. And, as with natural disasters, it’s prudent to preempt.

The preemption of crime is the theme of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, which describes an imaginary world several decades in the future in which people are arrested and incarcerated (in a virtual reality world) before they commit crimes, based on the skills of experts who can visualize the future. The “crimes” of which they are convicted are called PreCrimes.n Sommers’s society in which free will is denied and guilt and innocence are rendered meaningless, there is no moral reason not to incarcerate people for PreCrimes. Of course, they’re not guilty, but they aren’t guilty even after they commit a crime, and they are never innocent either. Why wait to incarcerate people predisposed to crime? Why wait to board up your windows and evacuate your home with the approach of a hurricane? Why wait until a man has committed a crime to incarcerate him?

Hannah Arendt  observed that a hallmark of totalitarian states is the eclipse of the concept of guilt and innocence. In a totalitarian state, masses of people are managed like livestock, irrespective of any imputation of personal guilt or innocence. Hitler didn’t kill Jewish children because they were guilty of crimes. He cared not whether they were guilty or innocent. Stalin didn’t starve millions of Ukrainians because they were individually guilty. He starved them as a matter of public policy, without regard for individual moral culpability.

The denial of free will, and the denial of moral culpability that follows on it, is the cornerstone of totalitarianism. The denial of free will does not, pace Dr. Sommers, herald an era of tolerance and understanding. It heralds an era of human livestock management, and the early experiments based on denial of free will and moral culpability — in Germany and the Soviet Union — have already been run.

Darwinists summon cancer to the ramparts.

Sick of the Oxygen Theory of the Cambrian Explosion? Here’s the Cancer Theory
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s Doubt? You were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a “Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.”  Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion.

Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. 

Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would sanctify tumors as “biological innovations” leading to anything good.

The new hypothesis holds that the dramatic diversification of animals resulted from a revolution within the animals’ own biology, rather than in the surrounding chemistry on Earth’s surface.

This will be a hard sell, but charitably, let’s give them their slot on the Cambrian Gong Show and try to understand their act. It’s good to see they toss out the oxygen theory, the runner-up for worst explanation. Agreed, “a causal relationship between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen lacks convincing evidence.” With itching ears we await their convincing evidence for the new hypothesis.

The leader figure behind the cancer theory is geobiologist Emma Hammarlund. She got in touch with a tumor biologist, Sven Påhlman, to consider how cancer acts like a multicellular organism.

“I wanted to learn what tumor scientists observe on a daily basis, in terms of tissue growth and how it relates to oxygen. Tumours are after all, and unfortunately, successful versions of multicellularity”, explains Emma Hammarlund.

OK, so we have multicellularity. Tumors don’t seem to automatically grow eyes and articulated limbs, though. As far as we can tell, tumors only seem to be good at killing their hosts. What’s up with this new hypothesis?

The team, including also tumor biologist Dr. Kristoffer von Stedingk at Lund University’s Paediatrics division, tackled the historic question of why animals developed so late and dramatically with novel clues from the field of tumour biology.

Basically, they looked at stem cells to see how they respond to oxygen. Generally, low oxygen (hypoxia) is a threat to a cell, and stem cells are particularly sensitive to hypoxia (are you still following?). Stem cells, therefore, have various mechanisms to deal with fluctuating oxygen levels. Well lo and behold, tumor cells do, too!

These systems involve a protein that can ‘fool’ cells [to] act as if the setting was hypoxic. This can also fool cells to get stem cell-like properties.

Tumor cells, they say, are able to maintain their stem-cell-like traits in spite of low oxygen. This gives them the freedom to evolve, just like microbes found a way to use sunlight. (What?) You may have to read this news several times to see how they get from point A, an uncontrolled tumor cell, to point B, a trilobite.

The new hypothesis that gives credit to a biological innovation to have triggered animal diversification is similar to how we think of biological innovations changing life in the past. Just the presence of free oxygen is the result of some microbes finding a way of using sunlight to get energy. This was also a biological event.

Dr. Hammarlund is a little clearer about what she means in her article at The Conversation, “Cancer tumours could help unravel the mystery of the Cambrian explosion.”

Could tumours help us explain the explosion of life of Earth? Scientists have typically explained the period of history when large animal species became much more diverse very quickly as the result of the planet’s rising oxygen levels. But my colleagues and I have developed a new idea that the change might have started within animals’ own biology, based on evidence from proteins found in tumours. It wasn’t until animals developed these proteins that they could take advantage of the oxygen and start diversifying.

This new hypothesis appears partly motivated by the failure of the oxygen theory to account for the Cambrian explosion. Here’s how it goes. In short, proteins “developed” out of nowhere. By chance, they gave cells the opportunity to “take advantage” of oxygen. This set them free to diversify. And there you go: trilobites.

Does she explain exactly how they diversified into animals with multi-system, hierarchical body plans with complex systems and behaviors? Not at all. Take a look at this newly discovered Cambrian bristle worm from Marble Canyon in Canada and see if it looks like the product of a tumor set free to diversify (Live Science).

Maybe the original paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution can clarify things. The title is, “Refined control of cell stemness allowed animal evolution in the oxic realm.” The peer-reviewed explanation follows:

Animal diversification on Earth has long been presumed to be associated with the increasing extent of oxic niches. Here, we challenge that view. We start with the fact that hypoxia (<1 a="" achieved="" action="" adult="" allowed="" and="" animal="" animals="" at="" be="" biology="" can="" cell="" cells="" cellular="" challenges="" concentrations.="" conditions="" consistent="" continuously="" control="" cope="" diversification="" enabled="" evidence="" evolution="" evolve="" factors="" fluctuating="" from="" geological="" how="" hypoxia-inducible="" hypoxia-response="" i="" illuminate="" immaturity="" in="" insights="" into="" is="" life.="" machinery="" maintains="" multicellular="" nevertheless="" new="" novel="" o2="" of="" on="" onset="" over="" oxic="" oxygen-sensing="" oxygen="" oxygenated="" paradoxically="" perspective="" provided="" provides="" realm.="" refinement="" regenerate="" regenerating="" settings.="" stem="" stemness="" suggest="" that="" the="" them="" then="" these="" this="" through="" thus="" tissue.="" tissue="" to="" transcription="" tumour="" unprecedented="" view="" we="" whereas="" with="">

From this, you see that all they are really doing is “enabling” microbes to evolve into animals, no matter how much oxygen is present. The authors endow microbes with new transcription factors that don’t restrict the action of their stem-cell properties as oxygen levels rise. Microbes can now become “successful versions of multicellularity” like cancerous tumors, and thus evolve into the Cambrian animals. Are we missing something? Do the judges want to gong this show yet?

In his recent book, Zombie Science, Jonathan Wells already gonged the cancer act when it played in a different venue. Evolutionists feel depressed at the lack of enthusiasm for Darwinism in medical science. A recent paper in PLOS ONE admits this:

Evolutionary biology currently has a marginal place within medicine. There is even a significant tendency to avoid the ‘e-word’ in the biomedical literature when referring to antimicrobial resistance.

In his chapter on antimicrobial existence as an icon of evolution (Chapter 8), Wells discusses the cancer hypothesis as another proposed example of “speciation” of sorts. This claim goes back to Julian Huxley in 1958, and continues today. Most recently, Joshua Swamidass used cancer not as an example of speciation, but of evolution by mutation and selection of the “fittest variants” (not fittest for the host, obviously). Swamidass and others try to view tumor cells as innovators. Wells looks into the examples provided by evolutionists and finds them lacking true novelty. They only rewire existing complex functions, but already have existing complex resources to draw on (p. 166). This is not innovation. It’s more like theft.

Evolutionary theory, furthermore, does little to guide medical science into new treatment options for cancer patients. Its value is “questionable, at best,” Wells concludes (p. 167). It certainly fails as evidence for evolution.

But some people argue that cancer is at least of value in providing evidence for evolutionary theory. Something doesn’t seem right here. According to evolutionary theory, the human body originated by mutation and selection, though the evidence shows that those processes cannot produce anything like a human body. Now we have evidence that mutation and selection can produce cancer, which destroys the human body. How does that support evolutionary theory? (pp. 167-168).

Applying this reasoning to Hammarlund’s cancer hypothesis for the Cambrian explosion, one finds no evidence that tumors can innovate the body plans of Cambrian animals. Jonathan Wells’s last paragraph applies here as well:

Darwinian evolution needs examples of biological processes that build new forms and functions. Cancer destroys these things. Saying cancer is evidence for biological evolution is like saying that I have a theory that explains the rise of modern civilization, and the evidence for my theory is the night of the living dead. (p. 168).

So to the cancer theory for the Cambrian explosion, the most desperate yet, we hit the gong and await the next act.

Mind over matter?

The Representation Problem and the Immateriality of the Mind
Michael Egnor

Materialism as a metaphysical perspective fails on countless levels. Nowhere is that failure more clear than in the understanding of the mind and the brain. The central failure of materialism in philosophy of the mind is the representation problem.

Mental representation is a big topic and has been a fertile issue in philosophy, especially over the past two centuries. I’ll focus on the role of mental representation in abstract thought, which is where the inadequacies of materialism are most obvious.

Thoughts may be divided into thoughts about particulars and thoughts about universals. Thoughts about particulars are thoughts, including perceptions, imagination, memory, etc., about particular objects in our environments. Thoughts about my coffee, or my car, or my family would be thoughts about particulars.

Thoughts about universals are abstract thoughts, and are thoughts about concepts. Justice, mercy, logic, mathematics, etc., are abstract thoughts.

For a materialist, all thoughts are generated by the brain. All that exists is matter, as understood by physics and chemistry. Thus, all thoughts, for the materialist, are generated purely physically, by neurons, neurotransmitters, action potentials, etc. So when we think about a particular object, that thought must somehow actually be a physical thing — a molecule or a relationship between molecules, etc. But of course, if I think about a particular thing — my cat Tabby, for example — my actual cat Tabby isn’t in my brain, so the materialist would say that my cat Tabby is somehow “represented” in my brain, and that representation constitutes the thought, without (immaterial) remainder. In the materialist view, all thought is, boiled down, matter of some sort, or is at least wholly represented in matter.

For thoughts about particular objects, this materialist scheme is not entirely implausible. For some aspects of visual perception, for example, there is a mapping of the visual field from the retina to the cortex, so that an image (of sorts) is represented in the brain as a field of neurons that are activated in a pattern. One might say that the pattern is the representation of the visual image. This still leaves much to be explained, but at least it is not utterly implausible to say that a thought about a particular thing — for example, a perception of my cat Tabby — is a representation in my brain. We still have no scientific (or metaphysical) explanation as to how this neuronal pattern actually becomes the thought, of course. But mental representation may provide a real level of explanation for thought about particulars.

But abstract thought is different. Consider a thought about justice. Justice is a concept, not a particular thing existing in the physical world. The materialist must ask: how can a thought about justice be represented in the brain? It certainly can’t merely be a mapped field in the cortex — justice has no shape or physical pattern, unlike my cat Tabby. A materialist would no doubt say that, like perception of particulars, thought about justice is represented in the cortex. But note carefully what representation means: a representation is a map of a thing. It presumes the existence, in the physical world, of that which it maps. A representation of a city — a map — presumes the city. A representation of my cat presumes my cat. And here’s the problem: a representation of my thought about justice presumes my thought about justice. So representation cannot provide any final explanation for abstract thought, because the representation of an abstract thought, even if it exists, presupposes the abstract thought itself.

As an example, let us suppose that a certain pattern of neuronal activation in my cortex were shown to represent my thought about justice. Obviously that pattern is not my thought about justice itself — justice is a concept, not a bunch of neurons. And if that pattern of neuronal activation represented my thought about justice, it must map to my thought of justice, which presupposes my thought about justice and thus cannot explain it.

Succinctly, mental representation of abstract thought presupposes abstract thought, and cannot explain it. It is on abstract thought that materialism, as a theory of mind, flounders. Abstract thought, classically understood as intellect and will, are inherently immaterial. Any representation in the brain of abstract thought (while it may exist) necessarily presupposes abstract thought itself, which must, by its nature, be an immaterial power of the mind.

The human mind is a composite of material particular thought and immaterial abstract thought. Interestingly, modern neuroscience supports this view. Perception of particulars maps with precision to brain anatomy, but abstract thought is not mapped in the same way. Material powers of the brain are ordinarily necessary for exercise of abstract thought (e.g., you have to be awake to think about justice), but matter is not sufficient for abstract thought.

Abstract thought is an immaterial power of the mind.

The bomb-throwing continues.

The Scientist Who Shouldn’t Exist — New Book by Matti Leisola, Jonathan Witt 
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Matti Leisola isn’t supposed to exist. According to the standard patter from evolutionists, there is no controversy about evolution in the scientific community, nor any need for serious consideration of the theory of intelligent design. That’s because no legitimate scientist doubts modern evolutionary theory; and even if there may be a handful of such doubters in the U.S., there certainly are none to speak of in enlightened Western Europe.

A new book by and about distinguished Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola authoritiatively brushes aside these Darwinist talking points. The book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, co-written with Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Witt, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture.

Dr. Leisola is the former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology, and the author of 140 peer-reviewed science publications on enzymes and rare sugars. Among other distinctions, he is a winner of the Latsis Prize of the ETH Zürich.

While arguing, from vast experience, against modern evolutionary theory and for intelligent design, the book is also a memoir. The back cover nicely summarizes the narrative thread:

What happens when an up-and-coming European bioscientist flips from Darwin disciple to Darwin defector? Sparks fly….Heretic is the story of Leisola’s adventures making waves — and many friends and enemies — at major research labs and universities across Europe.

Leisola’s deep knowledge of biology is evident throughout the book, but fellow scientists may find Chapter 10 particularly valuable. There, Leisola unpacks what he has learned about evolution and design from his work on engineering enzymes and microbes.

Dr. Witt worked with Dr. Leisola to make the book readily accessible to a broad audience. A gifted science writer and explainer, Witt is the author previously of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Intelligent Design Uncensored, and three documentaries that have appeared on PBS, including The Privileged Planet.

From the introduction, describing how Leisola started down the path to scientific heresy:

As a young student, I used to laugh at those who, as I thought, placed God in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. This God-of-the-gaps criticism is often leveled against Christians and other religious believers, against all those who insist there is clear evidence of design in nature. To my way of thinking, such people lacked the patience and level-headedness that I possessed. It was so clear to me: Instead of plugging away to discover the natural mechanism for this or that mystery about the natural world, these pro-design people threw up their hands and used the God-did-it explanation as a cover for ignorance.

This criticism of intelligent design proponents struck me as reasonable, so I didn’t listen to their arguments. But eventually I came to realize that this criticism cuts both ways, since a functional atheist also can reach for pat explanations in the face of mystery. It’s just that for him, the pat explanation will never be God. That is, you do not need God in your explanatory toolkit in order to short-circuit careful scientific investigation and reasoning. I realized that I myself had been all too willing to stuff vague materialistic explanations into the gaps of our scientific knowledge….

Also, their argument for entertaining only material explanations in the sciences just assumes that everything we find in nature has a purely material cause. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if there are features of the natural world — the laws and constants of nature itself, for instance — that really are the work of a creative intelligence?

Scientists are supposed to investigate mysteries with an open mind, not assume an explanation from the outset. I came to see that the best approach is to evaluate which explanation among the live options is more logical and fits the facts better.

The book has already garnered impressive endorsements from other scientists. One is from Dr. Erick J. Vandamme, Emeritus Professor of Bioscience Engineering, Centre for Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology, Ghent University, Belgium. Another is by Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells.

More on those later. Here we’ll only quote an especially colorful passage from German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönning’s endorsement. Heretic, he writes, is “the exciting story of almost the entire spectrum of aberrant motives, absurd fears, and unreasonable reactions to intelligent design (ID) by evolutionary scientists, clergymen, and church institutions alike.”

Heretic is also a story of fellow Darwin doubters discovered, and new supporters for ID won, in the most unexpected places. But for that you will have to read the book. Get it now at Amazon in paperback or Kindle.