Psience Quest

(2023-06-09, 04:50 PM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]Well a lot of biology proceeds by simply collecting facts.

Sure, but those observed facts are then analyzed to develop understandings of how those facts relate and how things work. Scientists use methodological naturalism to do this. That is, regardless of whether one thinks gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons exist, if one wants to understand what is going on in the world, then, when doing science, one can expect the best results by putting those entities aside and looking for natural, physical causes of events. When doing this, we make scientific progress. When we resort to, "God does it," although this could be true, we find nothing useful that enhances our scientific knowledge.

Quote:I am strongly of the opinion that our everyday world is embedded in and loosely coupled to a larger reality that science tends to ignore. That is the only way that certain observed phenomena can be explained. These are generally called psi phenomena, and there are just too many of them to explain them all as bad science or fraud.

When I say something is non-physical, what I mean is that it uses that larger realm to do what it does.

This is in response to my question, "What do you even mean when you say something is 'non-physical'?"

You refer to a "larger reality that science tends to ignore" and say that something that is non-physical "uses that realm". By this definition, "non-physical" means anything pertaining to things science tends to ignore. Why not just call them "physical things that science has tended to ignore? " The fact that scientists have ignored something so far doesn't seem to justify calling it "non-physical".

When scientists stop ignoring it, does it suddenly become physical?

Want to try again? What do you mean when you say something is non-physical? Does that word even mean anything?

Quote:The trouble is, I think you don't read any of the large literature that would inform you as to why this site exists.

I have been reading posts and links here, and am having a hard time even fitting all that into my day, let alone whole books.

Quote:We are not all somehow inadequately educated, or deluded in some way!

I never said you were inadequately educated or deluded. I asked you how you learned about quantum mechanics. You answered that, among other things, you learned it while studying for your PHD 50 years ago. I'll assume you are telling the truth. That certainly makes you an educated person.

(2023-06-11, 12:03 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]That is, regardless of whether one thinks gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons exist, if one wants to understand what is going on in the world, then, when doing science, one can expect the best results by putting those entities aside and looking for natural, physical causes of events.

The problem comes if we are looking a phenomenon in which gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons did in fact have some part to play in what went on. In that case science just doesn't work.

Doing science predicated on the assumption that X is false, and then using that to 'prove' that X is false, is just lousy science however eminent the research team might be.

If you read "Entangled Minds" - written by a scientist - you will discover how to properly explore some of the phenomena of consciousness.

David

(2023-06-11, 11:28 AM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]I agree that one should not dismiss claimed research without looking at it. However, survival and PSI research appears to me to be mostly anecdotal, which is notably unreliable. Do you have reliable research supporting PSI?

That's an impressive list, and worthy of a longer reply if I get time. Let's just say for now that this looks like an argument from authority. Many of the claims look like religious claims about the fundamental ground behind everything being mind, which is simply a religious faith claim. Many scientists treat religion and science as nonoverlapping nuomena. They make faith claims in areas that they think are beyond science. Are the claims here based on science? If so, what is their reasoning?  

And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?

"Physical laws" are somewhat of a misnomer. They are not rules that declare what things must do. Rather, they are descriptions of how things work. 

Our universe appears to be based on a short set of principles on how things work, and everything else builds from there. One can easily visualize a multiverse where different sets of principles of how things work come into existence in different realms. Those realms that have sets of principles that make complex reactions that can build universes sometimes build universes.

This seems like a bunch of desperate talking points drawn from a pamphlet advocating the Materialist-Atheist faith...

As I've said a few times over, nobody has to believe in Survival. You seem so afraid that maybe atheism is wrong and by choosing it you've damned your self, so I don't expect you to read and genuinely assess the quality. The bias among those who've chosen the Materialist-Physicalist religion is so strong I generally don't take their assessments of Survival evidence seriously.

As for consciousness, I don't see why you keep referencing magic. As per Sam Harris, who recall is the New Atheist Horseman with a PhD in Neuroscience, Materialism-Physicalism needs a Something from Nothing "miracle" to get off the ground. So if Materialism was the religion I picked I wouldn't be so quick to accuse others of believing in magic.

Also amusing that everyone - even physicists some of whom are the "quantum fathers" - who disagrees with you must be asserting a religious faith, whereas people who agree with you I guess are super rational and just doing good science?

(2023-06-11, 11:01 AM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]Do you agree with Marshall's views? He writes:

He refers to this as subliminal consciousness. Is this what you are speaking of?

If consciousness is subliminal in a hidden field, that sure seems like the thing I described earlier, where the neurons of the brain are all working in a massive parallel effort, with some patterns building strength and emerging to attention in a steam we call consciousness. I was told all this subliminal work building our thoughts for us sounded like "an epileptic fit" (https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-i...5#pid52355). Now we find here a link describing much the same process, but instead of happening in the brain, it is said to be happening in some hidden field, whatever that is.  Marshall continues:


Which makes this even more weird. For instead of referring to an individual soul that is my literal self, we now find these conscious thoughts bubbling up from some kind of universal consciousness that is not confined to individual minds. Is that where your thoughts come from? Is this  universal non-individual hidden field generating thoughts for you and feeding them to your brain? Are your brain and my brain each getting our thoughts from the same field, but somehow my brain selects one set of thoughts, and your brain selects a different set from the same field? How is the brain making this selection? Marshall continues:


So does my brain act as a filter to select thoughts form this collective "subliminal sea of consciousness" such that it picks those thoughts out of that sea that are beneficial to my survival? The concept is bizarre. Do chimps and toads also draw their thoughts from this "subliminal sea of consciousness," or is their brain function much different from ours? If their brains are just physically processing physical signals, but ours are selecting from a sea of consciousness, why does the chimpanzee brain appear to be so much like ours?

I find the "self" strangely absent from your link. Instead we find a brain selecting the thoughts it wants from this universal sea. If anything in this picture can be described as the conscious self, it would be the brain.

I've already said I'm not convinced the Filter Theory is true. But this seems like a manipulatively bad reading of what Marshall said, whereas you can just read the Materialist Alex Rosenberg straight off the page and see him saying we can't have thoughts, and that when you think you have thoughts it's just an illusion.

We also have Sam Harris and Raymond Tallis, two atheists with neuroscience education, telling us Materialism is nonsensical because what it demands is nothing short of a Something from Nothing miracle that would violate our very basic logic. Harris throws the Materialist faithful a bone and says maybe it could be true in some unknown way, but I suspect this is probably just pity for people like Dennet who've wasted their whole lives evangelizing the Materialist faith.

So, again, for who knows how many times anymore - it doesn't matter if there are no souls, or if Filter Theory is false. Materialism is just nonsense, and can never be true.

Rosenberg even uses computers and animals for his point, that we don't really have thoughts about Paris or anything else ->

Quote:None of these sets of circuits are about anything. And the combination of them can’t be either. The small sets of specialized input/output circuits that respond to your mom’s face, as well as the large set that responds to your mom, are no different from millions of other such sets in your brain, except in one way: they respond to a distinct electrical input with a distinct electrical output. That’s all packages of neural circuits do in the rat and the sea slug. That’s why they are not about anything. Piling up a lot of neural circuits that are not about anything at all can’t turn them into a thought about stuff out there in the world. That was one lesson already learned by working through the Paris neurons: piling up more neurons, in the form of neural interpreters, for example, won’t turn any number of neurons already wired together into a circuit that is about anything else at all.

Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (pp. 184-185). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Quote:Physics and neuroscience both tell us, for different reasons, that one clump of matter can’t be about another clump of matter. Computer science combines both to show that human brain states can’t really be about stuff for exactly the same reason that the internal workings of your laptop can’t really be about anything at all.

Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (p. 186). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

So we have you telling us Materialism is true and the Materialist conception of the brain can produce Cogito Ergo sum. We have Rosenberg telling us Materialism is true and Cogito Ergo Sum is false, that we never actually have thoughts about anything.

One of you has to be wrong, and Rosenberg's argument about what Materialism would mean is clearer than your weird asides about animal souls and passing references to computer programs.

Yet to me it seems pretty clear, as it does to atheist philosopher & (retired) neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, that if Materialism-Physicalism means we cannot have thoughts about things we should conclude that Materialism-Physicalism is false. And of course if the Materialist conception of the brain cannot have thoughts about things, then again as per Tallis we cannot expect it to store memories.

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves: Debunking the tropes of Neuromythology

Raymond Tallis

Quote:...As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order. This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities, and the present epidemic of such neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on...

(2023-06-11, 03:48 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]You seem so afraid that maybe atheism is wrong and by choosing it you've damned your self, so I don't expect you to read and genuinely assess the quality.

The bias among those who've chosen the Materialist-Physicalist religion is so strong I generally don't take their assessments of Survival evidence seriously.

That does not address my arguments. Rather it addresses my person. This is known as an ad-hominem argument. It is regarded as a fallacy.

By the way, my writings are not motivated by fear, but by the desire to discuss these ideas and share what I have learned. And no, I do not support a materialist religion, but rather, I support the scientific search for truth.

But even if I was desperately afraid and unable to address the truth, that would not mean my arguments are wrong. So please address the arguments, not the person.

Quote:As per Sam Harris, who recall is the New Atheist Horseman with a PhD in Neuroscience, Materialism-Physicalism needs a Something from Nothing "miracle" to get off the ground.

I don't think Sam Harris believes in miracles.

Rather, he is saying that we don't yet understand what makes consciousness. "We don't yet understand" does not imply "therefore, miracle". It is OK to say, "I don't know."

Quote:So if Materialism was the religion I picked I wouldn't be so quick to accuse others of believing in magic.

I didn't accuse you of believing in magic. Instead, I had asked you these questions: "And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?"

Do you have any answers to those questions?

(2023-06-11, 04:32 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]That does not address my arguments. Rather it addresses my person. This is known as an ad-hominem argument. It is regarded as a fallacy.

By the way, my writings are not motivated by fear, but by the desire to discuss these ideas and share what I have learned. And no, I do not support a materialist religion, but rather, I support the scientific search for truth.

But even if I was desperately afraid and unable to address the truth, that would not mean my arguments are wrong. So please address the arguments, not the person.


I don't think Sam Harris believes in miracles.

Rather, he is saying that we don't yet understand what makes consciousness. "We don't yet understand" does not imply "therefore, miracle". It is OK to say, "I don't know."


I didn't accuse you of believing in magic. Instead, I had asked you these questions: "And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?"

Do you have any answers to those questions?

The point is you don't have any serious arguments, it's just talking points that as E.Flowers noted have been discussed for years by this group.

Additionally your biases don't convince me it's worth the time to pick over Survival evidence. As I've already said, I think it's fine if people don't believe in Survival. That you seem to care so much that I do believe in Survival, and are putting in so much effort to evangelize for the Materialist faith, also makes me question your ability to look at the evidence in an unbiased way. It's just not worth my time, but feel free to count this as a victory that I didn't have the courage to debate you or whatever...

And you can just read what Sam Harris says, specifically his mentions of Something from Nothing. Trying to pretend he didn't say what he said also isn't a serious argument. But leaving Harris out we'd still have a retired clinical neuroscientist in Tallis and Atheist's Guide to Reality author Alex Rosenberg. Both atheists, the former rejecting the Materialist doctrine and the latter evangelizing for it...yet [we see] that both agree that *if* Materialism is true it means we cannot have thoughts about Paris or anything else.

Just for the record, if anyone actually wants to read the discussions between the "quantum fathers" and the serious intellectual effort they put into understanding the place of consciousness in the universe, this is a great book ->

Quote:Quantum Theory and Measurement

• Edited by John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek
  

Sadly a lot of stuff also gets divided up into varied papers and collections that are not easy or cheap to get if one doesn't have university access.

Henry Stapp - previously mentioned by - and F. David Peat, however, are both guys who studied under some of the "quantum fathers" (Von Neuman & Bohm respectively IIRC) and their papers/interviews/etc are much easier to find on the 'Net.

(2023-06-05, 07:49 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

– Max Planck

You turn to a series of quotes from scientists, but this is not the way science is done. In the scientific literature, we look at the arguments, evidence and reasons of other scientists, rather than quotes. 

You have found a rather impressive list of quotes. Some of these are a little hard to know what they are talking about in context. Some are translations that might not pick up the nuance of the original statement of the original language. 

Let's look at the quote above from a scientist I have a lot of respect for, Max Planck. What is he saying? He appears to be saying that, when we look for the fundamental source behind molecules, for instance, we find something else like atoms. And if we look for the fundamental source behind atoms, we find smaller particles and quantum mechanics. When we get to the bottom of it all, and ask for the fundamental source behind that, Planck says we find consciousness.

What consciousness does he mean by that? We don't know. But if we look at his religious background, there is little doubt he is talking about God. He might mean a deist God rather than a Christian God, but we don't really know.

Planck was Lutheran. He wrote, "Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations … To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view."

So we know he sometimes made statements in line with Christian faith. At other times he appeared to be more deist or universalist, so we don't really know his inner beliefs. But he certainly did sometimes make statements in line with his inherited Lutheran faith.  
 
He also wrote, "As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit [orig. geist]. This spirit is the matrix of all matter."

And that certainly looks like a theological statement, declaring God as being behind it all.

In light of these other statements, it looks to me like the consciousness he said was fundamental to all existence was God. In other words, this statement you quoted above appears to be a statement of theistic (or perhaps deist) belief. It is not a statement of scientific discovery.

So yes, as I said, many great scientists were theists, and yes when speaking theology, they often used faith as their criteria, not science. And no, we cannot take Planck's statements of faith as holding the same scientific weight as his statements based on science. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck .

(2023-06-11, 06:00 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]You turn to a series of quotes from scientists, but this is not the way science is done. In the scientific literature, we look at the arguments, evidence and reasons of other scientists, rather than quotes. 

You have found a rather impressive list of quotes. Some of these are a little hard to know what they are talking about in context. Some are translations that might not pick up the nuance of the original statement of the original language. 

Let's look at the quote above from a scientist I have a lot of respect for, Max Planck. What is he saying? He appears to be saying that, when we look for the fundamental source behind molecules, for instance, we find something else like atoms. And if we look for the fundamental source behind atoms, we find smaller particles and quantum mechanics. When we get to the bottom of it all, and ask for the fundamental source behind that, Planck says we find consciousness.

What consciousness does he mean by that? We don't know. But if we look at his religious background, there is little doubt he is talking about God. He might mean a deist God rather than a Christian God, but we don't really know.

Planck was Lutheran. He wrote, "Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations … To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view."

So we know he sometimes made statements in line with Christian faith. At other times he appeared to be more deist or universalist, so we don't really know his inner beliefs. But he certainly did sometimes make statements in line with his inherited Lutheran faith.  
 
He also wrote, "As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit [orig. geist]. This spirit is the matrix of all matter."

And that certainly looks like a theological statement, declaring God as being behind it all.

In light of these other statements, it looks to me like the consciousness he said was fundamental to all existence was God. In other words, this statement you quoted above appears to be a statement of theistic (or perhaps deist) belief. It is not a statement of scientific discovery.

So yes, as I said, many great scientists were theists, and yes when speaking theology, they often used faith as their criteria, not science. And no, we cannot take Planck's statements of faith as holding the same scientific weight as his statements based on science. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck .

You've missed the entire point, perhaps deliberately because you've yet to make any serious arguments?

If we take "Physical" in "Physicalism" to mean what physics is supposed to show us, then why are people who looked deeply and even discovered & initially verified QM not "Physicalists" in the sense that they believe Matter can produce Consciousness?

If Planck had said whatever mysteries about consciousness remain we can be assured consciousness comes from matter my guess is you'd take that as part of your Materialist gospels.

But as physicist Adam Frank - who I already linked to, not that this ever makes a difference apparently - notes ->

Quote:How can there be one mathematical rule for the external objective world before a measurement is made, and another that jumps in after the measurement occurs? For a hundred years now, physicists and philosophers have been beating the crap out of each other (and themselves) trying to figure out how to interpret the wave function and its associated measurement problem. What exactly is quantum mechanics telling us about the world? What does the wave function describe? What really happens when a measurement occurs? Above all, what is matter?

Quote:This arbitrariness of deciding which interpretation to hold completely undermines the strict materialist position. The question here is not if some famous materialist’s choice of the many-worlds interpretation is the correct one, any more than whether the silliness of The Tao of Physics and its quantum Buddhism is correct. The real problem is that, in each case, proponents are free to single out one interpretation over others because … well … they like it. Everyone, on all sides, is in the same boat. There can be no appeal to the authority of ‘what quantum mechanics says’, because quantum mechanics doesn’t say much of anything with regard to its own interpretation.

As I've already said in this thread, the point is not that Idealism or some other view is the truth of physics. The point is that physics can support views that are decidedly not in line with the metaphysical belief of Materialism-Physicalism.

One can say that future physics will rule out all the interpretations that include consciousness as a fundamental, but this is just what Karl Popper called "Promissory Materialism".

As Peter Sjöstedt-H notes in Why I am Not a Physicalist: Four Reasons for Rejecting the Faith (already linked before in this thread) notes this just shows that "physical" is ill defined ->

Quote:It is often expected that a position be defined before it be rejected. In the case of physicalism, however, a reason for rejecting the position is the fact that it cannot be properly defined. This ambiguity in the meaning of “physicalism” is brought out through what is known as Hempel’s Dilemma, named after its formulation by philosopher Carl G. Hempel,[1] though it was in fact formulated earlier by Herbert Feigl.[2] The dilemma: it seems that the meaning of physicalism can be grasped through either of two horns. The first horn is exclusive belief in the phenomena of current physics, such as matter-energy, space-time, the fundamental interactions, and so on. The problem herewith is that such a belief is highly unlikely to be true. This is in part because we can witness the constant change of physics through history, realizing that our current state of understanding is but a moment within this history and thus, by pessimistic induction,[3] we realize that physics is likely to continue changing. Secondly, as is well known, the current state of physics cannot be final due, in particular, to the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Thirdly, as will be seen below, the role of the mind in current physics is undetermined.

Thus a self-proclaimed physicalist might therefore instead embrace the second horn of the dilemma: belief in the phenomena of a future, ideal physics. Yet there are two chief problems with this alternative. Firstly, how could one believe in physicalism if one did not know what that was? One may almost as well profess one’s adamant belief in drallewertism. Secondly, it may turn out that a future physics would include mentality amongst its fundamental elements. But because physicalism, as material monism, is as such opposed to dualism (one where mind and matter are equally fundamental), such a possibility would seem to contradict the current understanding of physicalism. As a result of this implication, many self-proclaimed physicalists add a “no-fundamental-mentality” condition to the meaning of physicalism to preclude such a possibility.[4] However, one cannot determine the future direction of physics, thus physicalism, by advancing ad hoc exclusionary clauses to suit one’s current preferences. It may well be that a future physics will be contrary to “physicalism,” as understood in such current exclusionary terms.

Once more I'll implore you to go read stuff like the collection of essays of the "quantum fathers" I mentioned in my last post. Read some Philosophy of Mind. [As a "meta" consideration - do you really think Raymond Tallis who worked as a neuroscientist for years and has published multiple books on philosophy has never thought about these talking points you harp on about?]

If you're still a Materialist, so be it, but at least your posts won't be trying to challenge us with stuff we've discussed, in some cases, around a decade or so ago in this small but stalwart group's long history.

“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
― Gilles Deleuze

(2023-06-11, 04:40 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]The point is you don't have any serious arguments, it's just talking points that as E.Flowers noted have been discussed for years by this group.

You write this after posting back my questions: "And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?"

Even if my arguments weren't serious, one would think these were questions you would want to answer if you could.

Quote:As I've already said, I think it's fine if people don't believe in Survival. That you seem to care so much that I do believe in Survival, and are putting in so much effort to evangelize for the Materialist faith, also makes me question your ability to look at the evidence in an unbiased way. It's just not worth my time,

I have explained multiple times that I am not saying the source of mind cannot include something we would call non-material. So why do you try to make it look like I am dogmatic that it needs to be just material?

I do not see how the fact that I tried to patiently present my views makes it a waste of time to listen to me.

Quote:we'd still have a retired clinical neuroscientist in Tallis and Atheist's Guide to Reality author Alex Rosenberg. Both atheists, the former rejecting the Materialist doctrine and the latter evangelizing for it...yet [we see] that both agree that *if* Materialism is true it means we cannot have thoughts about Paris or anything else.

I have read the posts and links you put up here many times that say we cannot have thoughts about Paris or anything else if the brain is the primary thinker. I find nothing there that convinces me that brain thoughts cannot be about something. I have shown you why I don't find this convincing. You keep on dumping the same stuff out here in response, as though he who gets in the last word wins.

If brains are not able to have thoughts about something, how do you know souls can have thoughts about something? How do they do it? Do they rely on magic? If not, how do they do this thing that you say is impossible for brains to do?

In the link you gave, Tallis ends with this paragraph:

Quote:These questions are posed because the case outlined here has been, necessarily, quite negative. It has merely been meant to clear the decks so we can set sail on the real work of finding a positive description of our nature, of the place of mind in nature, and, possibly, of the nature of nature itself. We need to start again thinking about our hybrid status: as pieces of matter subject to the laws of physics, as organisms subject to the laws of biology, and as people who have a complex sense of themselves, who narrate and lead their lives, and who are capable of thinking thoughts like these.
Source: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...-ourselves

So no, in this article, Tallis is not making the positive case that souls can do it. Rather he is saying we don't know how it is done.

And you cannot legitimately get from "we don't know" to "therefore souls".