I think therefore I am? It depends who you ask.

 Philosopher: I’m Neither Me, Myself, Nor I…Yet I Give Interviews! 

Michael Egnor 

It’s remarkable that given the abysmal logical state of modern neuroscience, modern philosophy of mind seems to be in a heated contest to be even more absurd. Secular meditation teacher Michael W. Taft interviewed leading theoretical philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Here is one set of Taft’s and Metzinger’s questions and answers, and my observations:

Michael W. Taft: You’ve written at great length about the experience of selfhood in human beings. So let’s start off by asking, What is the self?

Thomas Metzinger: The first thing to understand, I believe, is that there is no thing like “the self.” Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality. Selves are not something that endures over time. The first person pronoun “I” doesn’t refer to an object like a football or a bicycle, it just points to the speaker of the current sentence. There is no thing in the brain or outside in the world, which is us. We are processes… the self is not a thing but a process. 

What could Metzinger possibly mean by “there is no thing like ‘the self’”? Myself is the term I use to refer to me. I (and my self) are very much a part of reality, and I most certainly endure over time. I am an object like a football — in a sense — in that I exist in the world, I have mass and shape, and I have come into existence and will someday go out of existence in this world. Obviously, I have many abilities that a football doesn’t have — I have a sum of powers (physiological, sensory, motor, emotional, mnemonic, and rational) that comprise my soul. I am a composite of matter and soul, just as all things in the world are composites of matter and form. 

An Unintelligible Claim 

And Metzinger’s claim that we are not selves (“things”) but processes is unintelligible. A process is a state of change, and change presupposes a being that exists continuously through the process of changing.

This was Aristotle’s seminal insight into the nature of change: Change presupposes the continuity of an underlying substrate. A process requires a real persisting object that undergoes it.

I certainly change over time, but it is I that change. I am a substantial real thing that persists through the change. After all, if I didn’t persist, it would be nonsensical to say I changed. If I didn’t persist, that would mean that I went into and out of existence at every moment. That would be the creation and destruction of an infinite series of human beings, not the change of a human being. 

A Hilarious Irony 

There’s a hilarious irony in Metzinger’s absurd claim that there is no self and that we are merely processes. Here’s what Taft says about him by way of introduction in the article: 

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. As of 2011 he holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009 he served as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; from 2014 to 2019 he is a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College. 

How could Metzinger “hold” any position (academic or otherwise) if he is an evanescent process without substantial enduring reality? 

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

The environment as informant.

 Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: The Environment as a Source of Information. 

William A. Dembski 

I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier posts here and here.

In Rosenhouse’s book, he claims that “natural selection serves as a conduit for transmitting environmental information into the genomes of organisms.” (p. 215) I addressed this claim briefly in my review, indicating that conservation of information shows it to be incomplete and inadequate, but essentially I referred him to technical work by me and colleagues on the topic. In his reply, he remains, as always, unpersuaded. So let me here give another go at explaining the role of the environment as a source of information for Darwinian evolution. As throughout this response, I’m addressing the unwashed middle. 

Darwinian evolution depends on selection, variation, and replication working within an environment. How selection, variation, and replication play out, however, depends on the particulars of the environment. Take a simple example, one that Rosenhouse finds deeply convincing and emblematic for biological evolution, namely, Richard Dawkins’s famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL simulation (pp. 192–194 of Rosenhouse’s book). Dawkins imagines an environment consisting of sequences of 28 letters and spaces, random variations of those letters, and a fitness function that rewards sequences to the degree that they are close to (i.e., share letters with) the target sequence METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.  

So What’s the Problem? 

The problem is not with the letter sequences, their randomization, or even the activity of a fitness function in guiding such an evolutionary process, but the very choice of fitness function. Why did the environment happen to fixate on METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL and make evolution drive toward that sequence? Why not a totally random sequence? The whole point of this example is to suggest that evolution can produce something design-like (a meaningful phrase, in this case, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) without the need for actual design. But most fitness functions would evolve toward random sequences of letters and spaces. So what’s the difference maker in the choice of fitness? If you will, what selects the fitness function that then selects for fitness in the evolutionary process? Well, leaving aside some sort of interventional design (and not all design needs to be interventional), it’s got to be the environment. 

But that’s the problem. What renders one environment an interesting source of evolutionary change given selection, variation, and replication but others uninteresting? Most environments, in fact, don’t lead to any interesting form of evolution. Consider Sol Spiegelman’s work on the evolution of polynucleotides in a replicase environment. One thing that makes real world biological evolution interesting, assuming it actually happens, is that it increases information in the items that are undergoing evolution. Yet Spiegelman demonstrated that even with selection, variation, and replication in play, information steadily decreased over the course of his experiment. Brian Goodwin, in his summary of Spiegelman’s work, highlights this point (How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, pp. 35–36): 

In a classic experiment, Spiegelman in 1967 showed what happens to a molecular replicating system in a test tube, without any cellular organization around it. The replicating molecules (the nucleic acid templates) require an energy source, building blocks (i.e., nucleotide bases), and an enzyme to help the polymerization process that is involved in self-copying of the templates. Then away it goes, making more copies of the specific nucleotide sequences that define the initial templates. But the interesting result was that these initial templates did not stay the same; they were not accurately copied. They got shorter and shorter until they reached the minimal size compatible with the sequence retaining self-copying properties. And as they got shorter, the copying process went faster. So what happened with natural selection in a test tube: the shorter templates that copied themselves faster became more numerous, while the larger ones were gradually eliminated. This looks like Darwinian evolution in a test tube. But the interesting result was that this evolution went one way: toward greater simplicity. 

Simple and Yet Profound 

At issue here is a simple and yet profound point of logic that continually seems to elude Darwinists as they are urged to come to terms with how it can be that the environment is able to bring about the information that leads to any interesting form of evolution. And just to be clear, what makes evolution interesting is that it purports to build all the nifty biological systems that we see around us. But most forms of evolution, whether in a biology lab or on a computer mainframe, build nothing interesting. 

The logical point at issue here is one the philosopher John Stuart Mill described back in the 19th century. He called it the “method of difference” and laid it out in his System of Logic. According to this method, to discover which of a set of circumstances is responsible for an observed difference in outcomes requires identifying a circumstance that is present when the outcome occurs and absent when it doesn’t occur. An immediate corollary of this method is that common circumstances cannot explain a difference in outcomes

So if selection, variation, and replication operating within an environment can produce wildly different types of evolution (information increasing, information decreasing, interesting, uninteresting, engineering like, organismic like, etc.), then something else besides these factors needs to be in play. Conservation of information says that the difference maker is information built into the environment. 

In any case, the method of difference shows that such information cannot be reducible to Darwinian processes, which is to say, to selection, variation, and replication (because these are common to all forms of Darwinian evolution). Darwinists, needless to say, don’t like that conclusion. But they are nonetheless stuck with it. The logic is airtight and it means that their theory is fundamentally incomplete. For more on this, see my article with Bob Marks titled “Life’s Conservation Law” (especially section 8).  

Pope urban II: a brief history.

 Pope Urban II 

Pope Urban II (Latin: Urbanus II; c. 1035 – 29 July 1099), otherwise known as Odo of Châtillon or Otho de Lagery,[2][A] was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 March 1088 to his death. He is best known for initiating the Crusades.[3][4] 

Church

Catholic Church

Papacy began

12 March 1088

Papacy ended

29 July 1099

Predecessor

Victor III

Successor

Paschal II

Orders

Ordination

c. 1068

Consecration

20 July 1085

Created cardinal

1073

by Gregory VII

Personal details

Born

Odo

c. 1035[1]

Lagery, County of Champagne, Kingdom of France

Died

29 July 1099 (aged 63–64)

Rome, Papal States, Holy Roman Empire

Previous post(s)

Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia (1078–88)

Cardinal-Bishop of Velletri (1080–88)

Legate in Germany (1084–85)

Sainthood

Feast day

29 July

Venerated in

Catholic Church

Beatified

14 July 1881

Rome

by Pope Leo XII

Attributes

Papal vestments

Papal tiara 

Pope Urban was a native of France, and was a descendant of a noble family from the French commune of Châtillon-sur-Marne.[5][6] Reims was the nearby cathedral school where he began his studies in 1050.[7]

Before his papacy, Urban was the grand prior of Cluny and bishop of Ostia.[8] As pope, he dealt with Antipope Clement III, infighting of various Christian nations, and the Muslim incursions into Europe. In 1095 he started preaching the First Crusade (1096–99). He promised forgiveness and pardon for all of the past sins of those who would fight to reclaim the holy land from Muslims and free the eastern churches.[9] This pardon would also apply to those that would fight the Muslims in Spain. While the First Crusade resulted in the liberation of Jerusalem from the Fatimids, Pope Urban II died before he could receive this news.

He also set up the modern-day Roman Curia in the manner of a royal ecclesiastical court to help run the Church.[10]

He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 14 July 1881.

Staff

Other popes named Urban