(2017-10-17, 04:24 PM)nbtruthman to Chris Wrote: [ -> ]You seem to be on the fence when it comes to Darwinism. I don't know what your position is re. psi and the afterlife, but I assume that you are aware that if you tend toward the proponent side of the psi/afterlife question and also Darwinism you also entertain a possible massive cognitive dissonance. This may also be the case for the converse. This is because the two are directly contradictory. Darwinism is the essence of reductionist materialism and very clearly says that the human being is nothing more than an intelligent animal, and consciousness is purely the result of massive data processing by billions of neurons. Clear implications of Darwinism are that psi and an afterlife are impossible and superstitious fantasies. Either Darwinism or psi/afterlife are the truth, but not both.
It's interesting, nbtruthman... I've noticed that you often express ideas that I've been vaguely intuiting or otherwise arriving at but haven't yet gotten around to expressing myself. The above is a case in point. Whilst I wouldn't express it in the same terms you have, nor quite as definitively, I've been slowly coming around to a similar position.
For me, it's not so much about the implications of psi (I think Chris expresses why pretty well) but about the implications of interactionist dualism, which I've been coming more and more to having strong confidence in as the correct theory of mind - and, of course, that position on the mind-body problem opens the door to the possibility (maybe even likelihood) of an afterlife - but/so I would premise a similar argument to yours on the implications of interactionist dualism rather than those of an afterlife, since I think interactionist dualism comes prior.
My similar argument to yours would be that if the mind is not "generated" by the brain, but instead exists in its own right and in some sort of
relationship with the brain, then the brain must somehow be "suited" as a "receptacle" for the mind, and it's hard to see how a strict neo-Darwinism can explain this suitability. First of all, it can't explain why minds exist in the first place, nor why/how they enter into relationship with brains - but this is not fatal. Secondly, whilst it is not
logically impossible that a neo-Darwinian process somehow produced brains that just happened to be "suitable receptacles" for minds, it would seem to be a very unlikely and strange thing if this
had happened, and if "somehow", from who-knows-where, minds floating around out there in the ether just "happen" to jump on board with brains at some point during a physical being's development after conception. More likely is that brains (and bodies!) had to be carefully designed so as to be a "fit" for the mind (and any soul/etheric/astral aspects of beings), and the process by which a mind becomes associated with a brain too had to be designed, and even continuously managed by - i.e. to decide which mind associates with which brain/body - (an) intelligence(s).
As you can see, I don't see this sort of argument as being
quite as strong as you seem to, but I do agree that there does seem to be at least some potential for major cognitive dissonance for one who believes both in the afterlife (and hence in mind-body dualism) as well as neo-Darwinian evolution.
Maybe as (if) I think about this sort of argument longer and harder I will find ways to express it that
are more conclusive. Thanks for - once again - expressing a very agreeable intuition/argument!