Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 183

Round 2: Naturalist philosopher replies to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor

David Papineau is considered to be one of the best exponents of physicalism, a form of naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism.”

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor was permitted the opening statement. Now here’s Papineau’s reply (partial transcript):

I’d say the central problem in materialist cognitive science over the last 50 years is explaining about this, explaining how it is that one stands for another, how something going on inside my head can be about Lima, the capital of Peru, about the city on the other side of the world, and I have a lot of detailed things to say about that, what it is that makes it the case that states in my brain or the words that I’m uttering have a semantic significance.

And I don’t see why, just to point to this is an argument for dualism. Suppose I accepted that there was some extra stuff beyond the material stuff, some kind of ectoplasmic mind stuff. Why wouldn’t the same problem just be there? How can this ectoplasmic mind stuff point to something on the other side of the world? How is this magic done? It doesn’t seem, to me, much of a theory to posit something mysterious and then say, “Ah, because it’s mysterious, it can account for something that’s difficult to explain.” I think we need serious theories, and I think when we have serious theories, we see that they’re perfectly consistent with the materialist point of view. That’s the argument from intentionality.

And I think the argument from reasoning is pretty much part of the same thing. Michael said, “Well, look, there’s logical connections between thoughts I have, and when I reason, I reason in a way that involves a sequence of thoughts having logical connections with each other.” I agree and that’s possible, because my thoughts, which I think of as material states of the brain, have semantic significance. They’re about things.

They’re about Lima being the capital of Peru, and I’ll say about Peru being in South America, and therefore Lima is in South America. I mean, I can have a sequence of thoughts that have that semantic content, and if they have that semantic content, then there’s logical connections between them, and if I reason in that way, I’m reasoning logically, and if I go Lima’s the capital of Peru, and Peru’s in South America, so Lima’s in North America, then I’m not reasoning logically, and I don’t see any difficulty for materialism explaining that. So I’m kind of curious about why Michael thinks just pointing to these things amounts to an argument.

News, “Round 2: Philosopher Papineau replies to neurosurgeon Egnor” at Mind Matters News

Also: Here’s Part 1 (includes partial transcript):

Neurosurgeon Egnor takes on philosopher Papineau Round 1 In the debate, Egnor begins by offering three fundamental reasons why the mind is not the brain. Neuroscience caused Egnor to honestly doubt Papineau’s materialist perspective that the mind is simply what the brain does. Dr. Papineau is considered to be one of the best defenders of naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism.”

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Your chances of living to be over 100

Doubtless, improved by modern medicine. We sometimes do stories on human longevity:

Using a Bayesian approach to estimate probability, the UW team created projections for the maximum reported age at death in all 13 countries from 2020 through 2100.

Among their findings:

Researchers estimated near 100% probability that the current record of maximum reported age at death — Calment’s 122 years, 164 days — will be broken;

The probability remains strong of a person living longer, to 124 years old (99% probability) and even to 127 years old (68% probability);

An even longer lifespan is possible but much less likely, with a 13% probability of someone living to age 130;

It is “extremely unlikely” that someone would live to 135 in this century. As it is, supercentenarians are outliers, and the likelihood of breaking the current age record increases only if the number of supercentenarians grows significantly. With a continually expanding global population, that’s not impossible, researchers say.

People who achieve extreme longevity are still rare enough that they represent a select population, Raftery said. Even with population growth and advances in health care, there is a flattening of the mortality rate after a certain age. In other words, someone who lives to be 110 has about the same probability of living another year as, say, someone who lives to 114, which is about one-half.

“It doesn’t matter how old they are, once they reach 110, they still die at the same rate,” Raftery said. “They’ve gotten past all the various things life throws at you, such as disease. They die for reasons that are somewhat independent of what affects younger people.

“This is a very select group of very robust people.”

University of Washington, “How long can a person live? The 21st century may see a record-breaker” at ScienceDaily (July 1, 2021) The paper is open access.

Note: When pundits carry on about the alleged “population bomb,” has it occurred to any of them that in many parts of the world, people simply live longer now than we used to? We didn’t do anything except stay alive. So there are more of us around at any given time. Maybe one solution to the “crisis” is fewer pundits freaking out…

See also some of our other longevity stories:

Why Do Humans Live To Be Old When Most Animals Don’t? Pop Psychology Weighs In

Does Human Mortality Really Slow Down Between 105 Yrs And 110 Years?

and

How did we evolve to live longer?

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More on W.E.Loennig’s 1971 MS Thesis

At this Evolution News post I discussed the following section from W.E.Loennig’s 1971 MS Thesis. (He would go on to complete a PhD in genetics at the University of Bonn and work for 25 years at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research as a geneticist.)

Although every analogy breaks down when extended beyond the main points, I think his story about the Natives who discovered a helicopter is actually useful in thinking about Intelligent Design, because

This tribe was sure there was nothing more to the universe than their tribe and land.There actually was more to the universe than they thought.They couldn’t conceive of beings smart enough to build flying machines.Therefore they preferred any far-fetched “natural” theory, to the obvious one that some very intelligent, unknown, people had built the machine.The Natives thought that by explaining where the materials in the helicopter came from, they could make progress, but that was the easy part; the hard part is explaining how those materials were organized into a “goal-oriented…highly integrated system.” Jonathan Wells says “The secret of life is not the physical DNA molecule, but the information it carries.”

To those who say, but Darwin’s explanation for evolution is more plausible than this tribe’s “volcanic theory” I would say: no it really isn’t.

b) When we arrive at a place where we may temporarily be unable to progress and in this place insert God, we hinder the progress of science.

This objection is in principle valid. As church history shows, one has often enough inserted God into places where one did not know how to continue…places, however, that later proved only to be gaps in knowledge. In such situations scientific progress had to fight against the belief in God, at least with those who believed in a direct intervention of the Creator. In order to avoid this forever, one should never assume the direct intervention of God, and even in the case of phenomena we can’t understand [even if their organization points to an intelligent cause] we must never assume such an intervention, as even these phenomena may only be “not yet” understandable.

Although seemingly reasonable, this last conclusion is, as the following example shows, false. Let us suppose an indigenous tribe, who has never come into contact with an advanced civilization, has previously always used “supernatural powers” as an explanation for all events, but upon closer study has now regularly discovered that an “entirely natural” explanation has always been found for such events. Let us further suppose this tribe finally formalizes this discovery and asserts that “everything” must have a natural explanation, that is, an explanation consistent with their newly discovered laws of Nature. For the sake of argument, let’s insert some representatives of our advanced civilization into their region, let’s say landing with two or three helicopters, not in their immediate vicinity and unnoticed by the natives. Suppose the reason for the landing is a technical defect in one of the helicopters, whose crew is for safety transferred to another of the helicopters; the defective machine is left behind.

The story now gets interesting: our native tribe soon discovers this strange craft and now stands before the biggest puzzle of their history. At this point their demand that “everything” must be explained using their known laws of Nature must lead to comical miscalculations. Our entire tribe begins to ponder which natural laws could have caused this strange apparatus to come into existence. At this point, we can imagine to what clever ideas the tribesmen may resort. Some specialists among them have, for example, discovered that some of the metals which they have found in the helicopter are also to be found in some surrounding mountainous regions, and sometimes even in refined form, especially in the vicinity of volcanos. Thus the “volcano creation” theory evolves. To be sure, even after hundreds of years of intensive research they still don’t know how to explain in all detail how the development of the helicopter could have happened through forces of nature, for example, volcano eruptions. But they argue, based on their previous experience, that one must not allow anything other than natural powers to be considered; because “it is methodologically impossible to consider non-mechanistical factors as explanations for the origins of an apparatus.” 

We need not carry this example further. It shows, I hope clearly, that requiring adherence to a fixed method of research can lead to great errors. The justification, that earlier we have misinterpreted a large number of entirely natural phenomena by ascribing them to “non-mechanistical” factors, does not change this. When one confronts things that in our experience always point to consciousness, intelligence, and mind, that require planning and goal-oriented arrangement of material to highly integrated systems — when these things furthermore not only cannot be explained through known laws of nature but even defy known laws (such as the principle of increasing entropy), and when attempts to clarify them “naturally” raise thousands of other difficulties, then there is no longer any justification for ruling out “non-mechanistical” factors in discussions of origins!

With regard to the dangers of interpreting mechanistical phenomena non-mechanistically: this is a two-edged sword. The danger of interpreting non-mechanistical phenomena mechanistically is equally great. We should be on guard in both directions. In both directions we can hinder the progress of knowledge.

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Could the unusual ET phenomena be animal types – not human types – of life forms?

Readers may remember our recent note that the Pentagon is rethinking the practice of merely making fun of odd findings reported by pilots.

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts:

Not to enflame the alien hunters out there, but videos of the UFO’s taken by jets show two characteristics:
a) high speed (altitude)
b) high acceleration.

The shape is less important, but being pill-shaped means you are not aerodynamically suited for high velocities in high density air.

Humans can go at these high speeds, Mach 25 for the space shuttle, but it takes an enormous amount of fuel and rocket power. Plus, the shuttle has to have special tiles to dissipate the heat. Tiles and fuel = heavy and bulky which these UFO’s are not.

Second is the acceleration. Pilots wear “g-suits” that tighten when maneuvering, so that all the blood does rush to the head or feet. Even so, 3-5 g’s is typically the maximum a pilot sustains and at 9 g’s they typically go unconscious. These videos show UFO’s that appear to be pulling 20 or more g’s. I’d have to analyse them frame-by-frame to get the actual acceleration. But if you or I were in that craft, they’d be scraping off the cockpit with a spatula. Most s/c instruments that I build for satellites cannot handle 15 g’s, so we prefer liquid fuel boosters.

So the observation is a light weight, non-aerodynamic high-speed, ultra-high acceleration object. Is it human made? Hardly. Is it weather phenomenon? Unlikely, though not ruled out. Is it US research? I wish. Is it little green men? Only if their biology is very unlike ours. Once again, having seen what extraterrestrial life looks like (cyanobacteria on comets) it is very likely that any ET is built like us, so I don’t think this is LGM. That leaves “other” as a category.

Where is this taking us? Well I think that these objects show purpose. Their motions aren’t random like Brownian motion or determined like meteor trails. So there is a rudimentary sensory/propulsion system apparent. But the need to handle high g’s means it is very rigid. The lack of rocket or fuel system suggests they are also very light. Their shape is also reminiscent of bacteria, where the surface/volume ratio is maximized. This leads me to think that they are biological, they are mostly air, and the biology is in a thin surface material or skin. Their energy source must be at high altitude, because they aren’t designed for thick atmosphere. The only energy sources at those altitudes are electric, with large electric potentials present over thunderstorms or in the aurora. Electrostatic forces can create very high forces, and that would be the form of propulsion. One way to check, is to see if the electric field is parallel to their motion, or if the magnetic field is perpendicular to their motion.

So in summary my best guess is that these are space cows, grazing on the energy in the high atmosphere and inflated by hydrogen. Perhaps if we knew what they ate, we could put a deer stand in the Space Station.

Once again, I let ID direct me toward biology, instead of knee jerk reaction the ID leads to mechanical space probes. It fits with what we know of biology, but is a compete projection of our insecurities when we think of it as a machine made by an alien race. Like Father Brown in GK Chesterton’s novels, who said “It wasn’t a ghost because I believe in ghosts”, likewise I think it is biological because I believe in human ID and biological ID, and it certainly isn’t human.

Note: Rob Sheldon is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II .

No, it’s not necessarily aliens. Could be other stuff we don’t know about. Maybe something like life forms that are not intelligent. But a big smirk is not a good approach to science or any other body of knowledge.

See also: The Pentagon’s UAP (UFO) report signals a sharp attitude change The brass have committed themselves to going “wherever the data takes us.” No, they didn’t report UFOs. But they reported enough mysteries to stop merely debunking and discrediting… and follow the evidence.

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Richard Lewontin (1929 – 2021)

Evolutionary biologist, perhaps best known for:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons” at New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997), a review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House)

We shall see.

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Irreducible complexity: Cilium edition

The cilium is a sort of “arm” of a cell that either moves stuff or feels stuff:

In Current Biology, Gaia Pigino wrote a “Primer” on Intraflagellar Transport (IFT). It’s called intraflagellar because a cilium is a type of flagellum (Latin for whip), which in the generic sense means a whiplike structure that can move. Both cilia and flagella use the IFT system for construction because both need to transport their building blocks down a shaft from the base to the distal tip. From the railcar’s perspective, the tip would seem a long way away.

There are motile cilia, like the ones that keep our windpipes clean and propel sperm cells, and “primary” cilia, which act as sensory antennae on almost all cells. Accurate construction of cilia is vital. When things go wrong, a host of problems called ciliopathies can result in severe diseases and death. Evolution News has mentioned these briefly in previous years (here, here, and here).

Consider first how many players are needed to build a cilium. Pigino’s parts list begins with microtubules in a 9+2 arrangement going up the cilium from base to tip. The two center microtubules are singlets; the outer ring of 9 are in doublet pairs. Riding on those rails are two engines: kinesin-2, which travels from base to tip (anterograde), and dynein-2, which goes from tip back to the base. Kinesin-2 has a head, stalk, hinge and two “feet” (called heads) that walk on the microtubule while carrying a load; the engine contains six protein subunits. Dynein-2 also has a motor, stalk, linker and tail, and is powered by two AAA+ domains that spend ATP for power. Those are the two engine types, and they work in teams along the microtubules.

Evolution News, “Cilium and Intraflagellar Transport: More Irreducibly Complex than Ever” at Evolution News (June 30, 2021)

Of course, Darwinism is dead. It is the Darwin profs and the institutional structure that supports them who are very much alive.

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Another Biology Big Bang: Pervasive proteins demonstrate intelligent design

Why not just admit it? Read this and see what you think:

“We built a time series of networks that describe how domains have accumulated and how proteins have rearranged their domains through evolution. This is the first time such a network of ‘domain organization’ has been studied as an evolutionary chronology,” Fayez Aziz says. “Our survey revealed there is a vast evolving network describing how domains combine with each other in proteins.”

Each link of the network represents a moment when a particular domain was recruited into a protein, typically to perform a new function.

“This fact alone strongly suggests domain recruitment is a powerful force in nature,” Fayez Aziz says. The chronology also revealed which domains contributed important protein functions. For example, the researchers were able to trace the origins of domains responsible for environmental sensing as well as secondary metabolites, or toxins used in bacterial and plant defenses.

The analysis showed domains started to combine early in protein evolution, but there were also periods of explosive network growth. For example, the researchers describe a “big bang” of domain combinations 1.5 billion years ago, coinciding with the rise of multicellular organisms and eukaryotes, organisms with membrane-bound nuclei that include humans.

The existence of biological big bangs is not new. Caetano-Anollés’ team previously reported the massive and early origin of metabolism, and they recently found it again when tracking the history of metabolic networks.

The historical record of a big bang describing the evolutionary patchwork of proteins provides new tools to understand protein makeup.

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, “Protein ‘big bang’ reveals molecular makeup for medicine and bioengineering” at ScienceDaily (June 30, 2021) The paper is open access.

In short, it all sort of happens at once, which suggests an intelligent origin.

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But IS there a theory of the origin of life?

At The Big Conversation Paul Davies and Jeremy England discuss whether we need a new theory for how life began (June 25, 2021). But do we really have any such theory now?

Two leading voices in Origins of Life research, Paul Davies and Jeremy England, discuss whether a new understanding of physics could be the key to unlocking the mystery of how life first emerged. But where does this leave the concept of God as creator? England, who is an orthodox Rabbi, and Davies, who describes himself as agnostic, talk about the implications for religious belief.

If life’s beginning was a historical event rather than a natural law, it may never be possible to recover the exact sequence of steps. That would be true no matter what we believe about anything else about the universe.

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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At Mind Matters News: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor takes on philosopher David Papineau, Round 1

Michael Egnor

In the debate, Egnor begins by offering three fundamental reasons why the mind is not the brain:

Michael Egnor: Just as a little background about where I’m coming from, I was raised as a functional atheist, and I was educated as a scientific atheist, so I was an atheist for most of my life. I was a biochemistry major in college, and I had and still have tremendous confidence in science and fascination with science. I had a conversion to Christianity, to Catholicism, when I was 45. There are a lot of reasons for it. I had a Damascus Road experience, you might say, but also, there were a lot of intellectual reasons as well.

I had felt through much of my career that physics, biochemistry, biology, and particularly neuroscience, just didn’t make a lot of sense in a materialist paradigm.

Note: Egnor had reason. He kept seeing patients who had largely missing brains or had brains split in half (for medical reasons, to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy) who lived normal lives. Whatever the mind is, it did not appear to be wholly dependent on the brain.

Michael Egnor: And particularly neuroscience kind of broke me away from my materialist perspective. When I was a first-year medical student, I was absolutely fascinated by neuroscience and neuroanatomy. I … was thrilled at the prospect of being able to understand my mind and the minds of people around me by learning about the neuroscience of the brain.

News, “Neurosurgeon Egnor takes on philosopher Papineau Round 1” at Mind Matters News

David Papineau

Takehome: Neuroscience caused Egnor to honestly doubt Papineau’s materialist perspective that the mind is simply what the brain does.

Next: Physicalist philosopher David Papineau replies. Stay tuned.

You may also wish to read: Philosopher: Consciousness Is Not a Problem. Dualism Is! He says that consciousness is just “brain processes that feel like something” Physicalist David Papineau argues that consciousness “seems mysterious not because of any hidden essence, but only because we think about it in a special way.” In short, it’s all in our heads. But wait, say others, the hard problem of consciousness is not so easily dismissed.

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We are told: The hunt for extraterrestrial life is about to enter a new era

Hope springs eternal:

In October 2021, a NASA flagship telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled to be launched into space. At 6.5 metres in diameter, it is twice the size of the previous largest telescope ever launched. Its large size will make it possible to measure the extremely dim atmosphere of planets hundreds of trillions of kilometres away.

And, being in space, its view won’t be hindered by Earth’s atmosphere, so will produce extremely crisp images and accurate measurements. NASA is so excited about finding signs of life with the JWST that it allocated 25 per cent of the telescope’s assigned observation time to study exoplanet atmospheres.

Chima McGruder, “The hunt for extraterrestrial life is about to enter a new era” at New Scientist

We shall see what we see.

See also: Aliens who landed here would just starve, a science writer predicts. We tend to assume that any life form could live with our complicated chemistry but what if — fundamentally — not? That if an intelligent life form landed on Earth with the opposite chirality to the one on which life forms on Earth depend = sugars right, amino acids left?

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