[MD] Consciousness a la Platt/Ham

[Ham Priday]

Arlo, Krimel, Chris, Platt (and other conscious persons) --


Feeling (part of my consciousness) that I've failed to supply the kind of 
answers demanded by Arlo, I decided to see what the scientific objectivists 
themselves had to say on the matter.  After Googling more than a dozen 
references under the key words "Conscious awareness, origin", I stumbled 
upon Apologetics Press which had devoted two issues of "Reason and 
Revelation" to this topic in May/June of 2003.  Much of this effort appears 
on this website, and I strongly recommend that Arlo & Co. review it, if only 
to see that Science has not been able to answer his questions.  In their 
Editors' Note to "The Origin of Consciousness [Part I], the authors Bert 
Thompson, Ph.D. and Brad Harrub, Ph.D. write:

"The late evolutionist of Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, candidly admitted that 
'consciousness, vouchsafed only to our species in the history of life on 
earth, is the most god-awfully potent evolutionary invention ever 
developed'.  But how did it develop?  The answer to that question has 
eluded, and continues to elude, materialistic researchers in every 
discipline - from science to philosophy.  Valiant (and repeated!) attempts 
to explain consciousness have been made, to be sure.  But all have fallen 
far short of the mark.  Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett was even 
so bold as to author a book with the self-congratulatory title, 
'Consciousness Explained' - which promptly was dubbed by his fellow 
materialists as 'Consciousness Ignored', because it failed so miserably in 
its quest."

Following are excerpts from their findings which include quotes from Paul 
Erlich to Steven Pinker.  But the entire article is fascinating and well 
worth your while.  The URL is http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/498 :

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In their book, "Evolution", the late geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and 
his co-authors wrote: "In point of fact, self-awareness is the most 
immediate and incontrovertible of all realities. Without doubt, the human 
mind sets our species apart from nonhuman animals".  Ervin Laszlo, in his 
volume, "Evolution: The Grand Synthesis", commented:  "The phenomenon of 
mind is perhaps the most remarkable of all the phenomena of the lived and 
experienced world."

Anthony O'Hear suggested:

"In being conscious of myself as myself, I see myself as separate from what 
is not myself. In being conscious, a being reacts to the world with feeling, 
with pleasure and pain, and responds on the basis of felt needs.... 
Consciousness involves reacting to stimuli and feeling stimuli. ...

"A self-conscious person, then, does not simply have beliefs or 
dispositions, does not simply engage in practices of various sorts, does not 
just respond to or suffer the world.  He or she is aware that he or she has 
beliefs, practices, dispositions, and the rest.  It is this awareness of 
myself as a subject of experience, as a holder of beliefs, and an engager in 
practices, which constitutes my self-consciousness.  A conscious animal 
might be a knower, and we might extend the epithet "knower" to machines if 
they receive information from the world and modify their responses 
accordingly.  But only a self-conscious being knows that he is a knower."
-- [O'Hear, Anthony (1997), Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of 
Evolutionary Explanation]

In "Man: The Promising Primate", Peter J. Wilson asked:

"[H]ow is it possible for one species, the human, to develop consciousness, 
and particular self-consciousness, to such a degree that it becomes of 
critical importance for the individual's sanity and survival?  And what is 
the meaning of this development in and for human evolution?"

Whatever that explanation may be, and wherever that "self " may have come 
from, there is one thing evolutionists know it is not - God and the 
supernatural.  Ian Glynn, in his book, "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin 
and Machinery of the Mind", admitted as much when he wrote:

"My own starting position can be summed up in three statements: first, that 
the only minds whose existence we can be confident of are associated with 
complex brains of humans and some other animals; second, that we (and other 
animals with minds) are the product of evolution by natural selection; and, 
third, that neither in the origin of life nor in its subsequent evolution 
has there been any supernatural interference - that is, anything happening 
contrary to the laws of physics. ...If the origin of life can be explained 
without invoking any supernatural processes, it seems more profitable to 
look elsewhere for clues to an understanding of the mind."

Alwyn Scott ("The Evolution Wars") addressed this same concept.

"What, then, is the essence of consciousness?  An answer to this question 
requires the specification of an "extra ingredient" beyond mere mechanism. 
Traditionally this ingredient has been called the soul, although the 
behaviorists dealt with the hard problem by denying it.  From the 
perspective of natural science, both of these approaches are unacceptable."

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I feel less inadequate now, having confirmed that the learned men of Science 
are no closer to resolving the mystery of Consciousness than are the 
philosophers.  But, since Arlo claims to have resolved it, perhaps he will 
now reciprocate and give us the "real" solution, a la Arlo.

Regards,
Ham