[MD] Consciousness a la Platt/Ham

[Platt Holden]

Hi Ham, 

Great post. Thanks. As for the hope expressed in your last paragraph, don't 
expect much. Arlo can't even answer a few simple, direct questions.


> 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
> :
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 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."
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- 
> 
> 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
> 
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