[Skyli]

In answer to the last point made by dlorde; who says that "the natural processes of Evolution are undirected."? Regardless of any spiritual connoctations the Universe is, and always has been, developing more and more complex products. In this respect it is far more like old Henrys production line than a place where matter, energy and dead cats can randomly appear, destructive and constructive in equal measure. I would have been happier with "appears to be undirected" but, given the Model T, I would still have wondered.

In respect to the primordial soup mentioned by alancalverd, there was no consciousness involved in "filling the niches"; natural selection took care of the finches and the cows still wander to the other field. Sentience may be the root of wanting "stuff that we don't need" but it is certainly not the root of "wanting more", as any Goldfish, notorious for eating themselves to death, can tell you.

[dlorde]

If nonsentient life evolved before sentient life, and sentience is the root of wanting more, how did nonsentient life come to populate the planet? Wouldn't it have been satisfied with the puddle in which it first evolved?

How do you define 'satisfaction' and 'want' for non-sentient life? They're generally considered sentient properties. Non-sentient life could populate the planet passively, from its puddle, by variations on the theme of splashing (caused by external agencies).

p.s. It seems unlikely that life evolved in a puddle

[dlorde]

In answer to the last point made by dlorde; who says that "the natural processes of Evolution are undirected."?

No, I said, "the processes of natural evolution are undirected". If you're going to quote me, please use cut & paste rather than memory.

Regardless of any spiritual connoctations the Universe is, and always has been, developing more and more complex products.

True, but it's a statistical observation, and it goes the other way too - complex things also become simpler. If you start at a certain level of complexity, things can either get more complex, less complex, or stay at the same level of complexity. There is a lower bound on simplicity, but no (known) upper bound on complexity, so complexity will increase. This says nothing about the relative abundance of complexity vs simplicity, if it was even possible to calculate such a measure.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Have you ever done some meditation ,Yoga , or some other spiritual exercises ?
Do not reduce yourself to just ..science .

I meditate, and spent some years practicing Yang Family Tajiquan (T'ai Chi). If physical & mental exercise, relaxation, mood elevation, and emotional balancing are spiritual, then they're spiritual exercises.

As you might expect, I take the mystical, paranormal side of it with a pinch of salt (e.g. I see the popular concept of 'chi' as the understandable result of an holistic rather than reductionist approach to physical & mental performance, coupled with a lack of detailed knowledge of human biology, especially physiology - with the more absurd paranormal aspects driven by fakes & frauds and their coteries of hangers-on).

Ok, do you have other hypotheses concerning consciousness, other than that materialistic magical  "emergence " trick   then ?
And how do you explain what you experience during meditation ...?

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Guys :

Did it ever occur to you that human consciousness might exist and function outside of the laws of physics ?
Otherwise , just tell me what consciousness is ,and where is it to be "found or localised " in man ?

Just try to answer the following as well, while you are at it :

If consciousness was the product of the "blind " evolution ,if the intellect is the product of the "blind " evolution ,both as some sort of pragmatic survival strategies, then it's pretty logical to question all our sense of reality , knowledge , including the scientific knowledge , including the scientific knowledge regarding  evolution itself = a paradox = try to explain this paradox to me then ...

[Skyli]

I'm sorry I misquoted you dlorde, it was careless and rude of me.

While I understand the argument regarding the bounds of complexity I do not understand why this means that complexity will increase. I agree that there is more "room" for complexity to increase but why must it? What does the universe gain from increasing complexity?

In relation to the last post from DonQuihotte, consciousness is a data-processing operation that takes place in the brain. However, the mind of man is made up of many elements - consciousness, instinct, the unconscious and the previously mentioned Self for example - there may be others. Whether they all have their basis in physics or not is a question of Faith.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Folks :

I do prefer this anti-reductionist , anti-materialist "emergence " trick, anti-neo- -Darwinian view ...represented by this philosopher , relatively speaking : Thanks ,Cheryl, for that :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

I do not see how relatively intelligent people can believe in that materialistic reductionist neo-Darwinian "emergence " trick bullshit  regarding consciousness  though : Amazing .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

In relation to the last post from DonQuihotte, consciousness is a data-processing operation that takes place in the brain. However, the mind of man is made up of many elements - consciousness, instinct, the unconscious and the previously mentioned Self for example - there may be others. Whether they all have their basis in physics or not is a question of Faith.

[/quote]

Explain this magic of yours to me , please  = consciouness is a data- processing that takes place in the brain : ..takes place where in the brain exactly ? how do you know just that ? Try to prove just that then .

Thanks, appreciate indeed , and welcome, even though we do have enough magicians here already , once again .

[Skyli]

A windmill might be useful right now.

I'm OK, you're OK. Great book. Read it many times. It occurred to me:

"Now there's an interesting thing. Values are learned initially though “instinct” and instinct in non-sentient creatures is something that helps to keep them alive and successful by controlling their behaviour – don't eat the grass by the T-Rex even if you are hungry and it looks good; eat other grass. Sentience extends this effect to include being “good” as well – alive, successful and good. Don't take the wallet that the customer before you just left on the counter even if you are pretty skint and he looks like he can afford it; it's not right. A £20 note blowing down the street is another matter, though also often difficult.
Could it be that instinct is part of the Self, that it lies very deeply rooted in the value system? Or could it be that instinct is the original, insentient version of conscience itself? This would indicate that the leap from insentience to sentience happened when this, very personal, reservoir of self-esteem got added to the Self, when the judgements of the conscience began to have a lasting effect on our “feel good” factor; guilt is cumulative and people who habitually deny their conscience are unhappy people. The doctors tell us that they are suffering from low self-esteem. If one thinks about this then would it not have been a brilliant evolutionary step in mental development? It would necessitate the development of memory so that one could look back at behaviour that didn't make them “feel good”. Furthermore better analytical ability, intelligence, would need to develop  in order to be able to “rationalise” why one chose behaviour that didn't make one “feel good” or, conversely, why one wasn't going to take the wallet.
Could Sentience be the natural bye-product of the introduction of Self-Esteem into our innermost characters, our Selfs?"

In other words, the whole development of sentience and intelligence was a natural, Darwinian, progression following the development of the psychological trait we call self-esteem, a quantity of every adult mind. Consciousness remains a purely biological function based on electrical impulses in the brain.

The proof you seek is on the trauma ward of every hospital. There are hundreds of brain damaged people who show reduced intelligence, awareness or any other measure of "consciousness".

Do you mean consciousness or do you mean the mind?

[dlorde]

Ok, do you have other hypotheses concerning consciousness, other than that materialistic magical  "emergence " trick   then ?

The only plausible hypothesis I am aware of for consciousness is that it is a function of brain processes.

And how do you explain what you experience during meditation ...?

I think the main benefits are the result of training the focus of attention in various non-stressful ways. I could probably be more specific given a more specific question.

[dlorde]

Did it ever occur to you that human consciousness might exist and function outside of the laws of physics ?
Otherwise , just tell me what consciousness is ,and where is it to be "found or localised " in man ?

I expect most people with an interest have considered the basis of consciousness; everything else we know about the universe exists and functions within the laws of physics, and as has been said here repeatedly, there's no good reason to make an exception for consciousness, and all the evidence suggests that it isn't an exception.

The evidence suggests it is a process, a function of the brain, which means it is physically localised to the brain. In the sense of it's perceptual or experiential domain, it extends to the sensory limits of our bodies, and can be considered to extend beyond that in various ways. The virtual location of the experiential self is generally felt to be 'behind the eyes', but that feeling can be distorted or dislocated in various ways (an indication that it is a construct of a mapping process).

If consciousness was the product of the "blind " evolution ,if the intellect is the product of the "blind " evolution ,both as some sort of pragmatic survival strategies, then it's pretty logical to question all our sense of reality , knowledge , including the scientific knowledge , including the scientific knowledge regarding  evolution itself = a paradox = try to explain this paradox to me then ... [/b]

Why do you think it's a paradox? it's logical to assume that those traits are rooted in optimising our chances of survival. Why should we question them any more than our hands and feet or our eyes? In evolutionary terms, they are tools that aid survival. No guarantees for the future though - what is beneficial in one context may not necessarily be in another.

[cheryl j]

To clarify, I see Evolution as a process that has been going on for the entire life of the universe; the "basic law" of Creation, if you like. The first "phase" was a foundation phase (from our perspective) where habitats eventually evolved, the second phase was Life, products that can change their environment to suit their needs, and the third phase is sentience.

I don't think there is such a thing as non-sentient life. That's part of the definition of a living thing - can reproduce itself, has a metabolism, maintains homeostasis, and responds to stimuli. Microbes have chemotaxis and move towards an increase in concentrations of nutrients and away from decreases in concentration. And there are unicellular organisms with photosensitive organelles as well.

Some biologists think the brains and nervous systems evolved in order to facilitate processing or responding to the information from the sensing systems, despite the fact that we tend to think of the senses "serving" the brain. Some jelly fish have well developed eyes but no brain. Their eyes transmit signals directly to the muscles. Anyway,  if sentience is defined as being able to sense something in the outside world and react to it in a way that increases survival, that was there from the get go.

[dlorde]

I'm sorry I misquoted you dlorde, it was careless and rude of me.

OK, no offence taken - I tend to be sensitive about it, as your own words are all you have online, and some people like to misrepresent and misquote what you say to make straw-man arguments.

While I understand the argument regarding the bounds of complexity I do not understand why this means that complexity will increase. I agree that there is more "room" for complexity to increase but why must it? What does the universe gain from increasing complexity?

Why should it be a question of what the universe gains? are you suggesting there is some kind of universal judgement of benefit? by whom, or what?
As I said, it's just a statistical likelihood if some interactions can have more complex results than others. If the more complex results happen to be as stable or more stable than the less complex ones, they are likely to persist. If not, they are likely to break down to less complex ones. Dynamical complex systems, like life, manage to maintain different complex equilibria in the short term (individual lifetime) and the long term (population or species lifetime), leveraging an entropy gradient.   

[dlorde]

Anyway,  if sentience is defined as being able to sense something in the outside world and react to it in a way that increases survival, that was there from the get go.

True, although sentience is often defined as conscious awareness.

[cheryl j]

Have you ever done some meditation ,Yoga , or some other spiritual exercises ?
Do not reduce yourself to just ..science .

I meditate, and spent some years practicing Yang Family Tajiquan (T'ai Chi). If physical & mental exercise, relaxation, mood elevation, and emotional balancing are spiritual, then they're spiritual exercises.

As you might expect, I take the mystical, paranormal side of it with a pinch of salt (e.g. I see the popular concept of 'chi' as the understandable result of an holistic rather than reductionist approach to physical & mental performance, coupled with a lack of detailed knowledge of human biology, especially physiology - with the more absurd paranormal aspects driven by fakes & frauds and their coteries of hangers-on).

Ok, do you have other hypotheses concerning consciousness, other than that materialistic magical  "emergence " trick   then ?
And how do you explain what you experience during meditation ...?

There are tons of studies about what goes on in the brain during meditation if you are really interested. They are hooking up Buddhists monks all the time to imaging instruments. The Dalai Lama, incidentally doesn't see any conflict between his spiritual practice and science, and says “In the Buddhist investigation of reality we traditionally employ four principles of reasoning: dependence, function, nature and evidence. Both approaches [science and Buddhism]  seem to work in parallel." He has invited many physicists and neuroscientists to speak at his conferences. “Bringing science to Buddhist monks does not mean bending the belief system,” he insists, “they are parallel, there is no attempt to harmonize the two."

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

@ dlorde : your reductionist magical neo-Darwinian views spring to the face of common sense as obviously false:

I do not understand in fact how can such a relatively intelligent guy such as yourself believe in that materialistic reductionist obvious non-sense :

See this introduction to this interesting book of philosopher Thomas Nagel i have been reading , i will post a link regarding a site where one can download almost all ebooks of Nagel for free , as i did :

The book's title i am talking about here is : "Mind and Cosmos : Why the materialist reductionist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false :


Chapter 1
Introduction
The aim of this book is to argue that the mind-body problem is not just a local problem, having to do
with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our
understanding of the entire cosmos and its history. The physical sciences and evolutionary biology
cannot be kept insulated from it, and I believe a true appreciation of the difficulty of the problem
must eventually change our conception of the place of the physical sciences in describing the natural
order.
One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed
and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. It may be frustrating to
acknowledge, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at which we find
ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding of which we
have not dreamt. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility
requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle
sufficient to understand the universe as a whole. Pointing out their limits is a philosophical task,
whoever engages in it, rather than part of the internal pursuit of science—though we can hope that if
the limits are recognized, that may eventually lead to the discovery of new forms of scientific
understanding. Scientists are well aware of how much they don’t know, but this is a different kind of
problem—not just of acknowledging the limits of what is actually understood but of trying to
recognize what can and cannot in principle be understood by certain existing methods.
My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from
some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics—a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung
that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in
principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world view
is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or
nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research. For all I know, most practicing
scientists may have no opinion about the overarching cosmological questions to which this materialist
reductionism provides an answer. Their detailed research and substantive findings do not in general
depend on or imply either that or any other answer to such questions. But among the scientists and
philosophers who do express views about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely
assumed to be the only serious possibility.1
The starting point for the argument is the failure of psychophysical reductionism, a position in the
philosophy of mind that is largely motivated by the hope of showing how the physical sciences could
in principle provide a theory of everything. If that hope is unrealizable, the question arises whether
any other more or less unified understanding could take in the entire cosmos as we know it. Among
the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical
world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some form of neutral monism over the traditional
alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. What I would like to do is to explore the
possibilities that are compatible with what we know—in particular what we know about how mind and
everything connected with it depends on the appearance and development of living organisms, as a
result of the universe’s physical, chemical, and then biological evolution. I will contend that these
processes must be reconceived in light of what they have produced, if psychophysical reductionism is
false.
The argument from the failure of psychophysical reductionism is a philosophical one, but I
believe there are independent empirical reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in
biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is
regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the
materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the
standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical
basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical
account becomes.2 This is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains
contemporary science to the nonspecialist. Perhaps that literature presents the situation with a
simplicity and confidence that does not reflect the most sophisticated scientific thought in these areas.
But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the
product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.
I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian
account of the origin and evolution of life.3 It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it
is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We
are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical
explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some
examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible
probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis
of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into
existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and
chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was
set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on
earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic
mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the
organisms that actually exist?
There is much more uncertainty in the scientific community about the first question than about the
second. Many people think it will be very difficult to come up with a reductionist explanation of the
origin of life, but most people have no doubt that accidental genetic variation is enough to support the
actual history of evolution by natural selection, once reproducing organisms have come into
existence. However, since the questions concern highly specific events over a long historical period in
the distant past, the available evidence is very indirect, and general assumptions have to play an
important part. My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite
alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of
scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of
common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.
The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools
needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day. That it has produced
you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. If contemporary research in
molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account
of the origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics, this can
combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind
are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form
teleological rather than mechanistic. I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous,
but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the
reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.
My project has the familiar form of trying to meet a set of conditions that seem jointly
impossible. In addition to antireductionism, two further constraints are important: first, an assumption
that certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to
pretend to a real understanding of the world; second, the ideal of discovering a single natural order
that unifies everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles—an ideal toward
which the inevitably very incomplete forms of our actual understanding should nevertheless aspire.
Cartesian dualism rejects this second aspiration, and the reductive programs of both materialism and
idealism are failed attempts to realize it. The unifying conception is also incompatible with the kind
of theism that explains certain features of the natural world by divine intervention, which is not part
of the natural order.
The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the
mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world,
expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some point it will be
necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It
seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one.
The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the
transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of the big
bang, cosmology has also become a historical science. Mind, as a development of life, must be
included as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history, and its appearance, I believe, casts
its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process
depends.
The question is whether we can integrate this perspective with that of the physical sciences as they
have been developed for a mindless universe. The understanding of mind cannot be contained within
the personal point of view, since mind is the product of a partly physical process; but by the same
token, the separateness of physical science, and its claim to completeness, has to end in the long run.
And that poses the question: To what extent will the reductive form that is so central to contemporary
physical science survive this transformation? If physics and chemistry cannot fully account for life
and consciousness, how will their immense body of truth be combined with other elements in an
expanded conception of the natural order that can accommodate those things?
As I have said, doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific
consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously
enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural
selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such
evolution. The more we learn about the intricacy of the genetic code and its control of the chemical
processes of life, the harder those problems seem.
Again: with regard to evolution, the process of natural selection cannot account for the actual
history without an adequate supply of viable mutations, and I believe it remains an open question
whether this could have been provided in geological time merely as a result of chemical accident,
without the operation of some other factors determining and restricting the forms of genetic variation.
It is no longer legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their
appearance through mutations in the DNA were unproblematic—as Richard Dawkins does for the
evolution of the eye.4 With regard to the origin of life, the problem is much harder, since the option of
natural selection as an explanation is not available. And the coming into existence of the genetic code
—an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can
read the code and carry out its instructions—seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable
given physical law alone.5
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific
world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a
religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe
and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments
they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully
explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves.6 Another skeptic, David
Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference.7 Even if
one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that
these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously.8 They do not
deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have certainly shown that there are ways to
resist the design conclusion; but the general force of the negative part of the intelligent design
position—skepticism about the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available
evidence—does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges.9 At least, the question
should be regarded as open. To anyone interested in the basis of this judgment, I can only recommend
a careful reading of some of the leading advocates on both sides of the issue—with special attention
to what has been established by the critics of intelligent design. Whatever one may think about the
possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its
evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing
but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing
the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.
I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design
alternative as a real option. I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed compels—so many
people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face
the expression of human feeling.10 So my speculations about an alternative to physics as a theory of
everything do not invoke a transcendent being but tend toward complications to the immanent
character of the natural order. That would also be a more unifying explanation than the design
hypothesis. I disagree with the defenders of intelligent design in their assumption, one which they
share with their opponents, that the only naturalistic alternative is a reductionist theory based on
physical laws of the type with which we are familiar. Nevertheless, I believe the defenders of
intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the
passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion.
That world view is ripe for displacement, in spite of the great achievements of reductive
materialism, which will presumably continue for a long time to be our main source for concrete
understanding and control of the world around us. To argue, as I will, that there is a lot it can’t explain
is not to offer an alternative. But the recognition of those limits is a precondition of looking for
alternatives, or at least of being open to their possibility. And it may mean that some directions of
pursuit of the materialist form of explanation will come to be seen as dead ends. If the appearance of
conscious organisms in the world is due to principles of development that are not derived from the
timeless laws of physics, that may be a reason for pessimism about purely chemical explanations of
the origin of life as well.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Have you ever done some meditation ,Yoga , or some other spiritual exercises ?
Do not reduce yourself to just ..science .

I meditate, and spent some years practicing Yang Family Tajiquan (T'ai Chi). If physical & mental exercise, relaxation, mood elevation, and emotional balancing are spiritual, then they're spiritual exercises.

As you might expect, I take the mystical, paranormal side of it with a pinch of salt (e.g. I see the popular concept of 'chi' as the understandable result of an holistic rather than reductionist approach to physical & mental performance, coupled with a lack of detailed knowledge of human biology, especially physiology - with the more absurd paranormal aspects driven by fakes & frauds and their coteries of hangers-on).

Ok, do you have other hypotheses concerning consciousness, other than that materialistic magical  "emergence " trick   then ?
And how do you explain what you experience during meditation ...?

There are tons of studies about what goes on in the brain during meditation if you are really interested. They are hooking up Buddhists monks all the time to imaging instruments. The Dalai Lama, incidentally doesn't see any conflict between his spiritual practice and science, and says “In the Buddhist investigation of reality we traditionally employ four principles of reasoning: dependence, function, nature and evidence. Both approaches [science and Buddhism]  seem to work in parallel." He has invited many physicists and neuroscientists to speak at his conferences. “Bringing science to Buddhist monks does not mean bending the belief system,” he insists, “they are parallel, there is no attempt to harmonize the two."

[/quote]

First of all , thanks a lot for telling me about philosopher Thomas Nagel : he seems to be my kindda guy ,so to speak : i have been reading his introduction as displayed here above for our hopeless reductionist dlorde , an introduction to his "Mind and cosmos : why the materialist reductionist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false " .I did download most of the man's books for free .

Second : You seem to have missed my thread : "What is the real origin of the scientific method ? " ,concerning the islamic origin of the scientific method : check it , if you haven't done so already .

Third : Thomas Nagel tries in that book of his to debunk that materialistic neo-Darwinian reductionism in science , he tries to show the obvious limits of man's knowledge , the obvious limits of science ....

Fourth and last :
Science is certainly very welcome in trying to shed some light on spirituality , religious spiritual or mystic experiences , consciousness ...via studying their corresponding links with the corresponding specific brain activity , but , those materialistic reductionist mechanical magical neo-Darwinian interpretations of those scientific studies concerning those activities of the brain corresponding to the above mentioned processes are just that : interpretations = have nothing to do with science proper .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

A windmill might be useful right now.

I'm OK, you're OK. Great book. Read it many times. It occurred to me:

"Now there's an interesting thing. Values are learned initially though “instinct” and instinct in non-sentient creatures is something that helps to keep them alive and successful by controlling their behaviour – don't eat the grass by the T-Rex even if you are hungry and it looks good; eat other grass. Sentience extends this effect to include being “good” as well – alive, successful and good. Don't take the wallet that the customer before you just left on the counter even if you are pretty skint and he looks like he can afford it; it's not right. A £20 note blowing down the street is another matter, though also often difficult.
Could it be that instinct is part of the Self, that it lies very deeply rooted in the value system? Or could it be that instinct is the original, insentient version of conscience itself? This would indicate that the leap from insentience to sentience happened when this, very personal, reservoir of self-esteem got added to the Self, when the judgements of the conscience began to have a lasting effect on our “feel good” factor; guilt is cumulative and people who habitually deny their conscience are unhappy people. The doctors tell us that they are suffering from low self-esteem. If one thinks about this then would it not have been a brilliant evolutionary step in mental development? It would necessitate the development of memory so that one could look back at behaviour that didn't make them “feel good”. Furthermore better analytical ability, intelligence, would need to develop  in order to be able to “rationalise” why one chose behaviour that didn't make one “feel good” or, conversely, why one wasn't going to take the wallet.
Could Sentience be the natural bye-product of the introduction of Self-Esteem into our innermost characters, our Selfs?"

In other words, the whole development of sentience and intelligence was a natural, Darwinian, progression following the development of the psychological trait we call self-esteem, a quantity of every adult mind. Consciousness remains a purely biological function based on electrical impulses in the brain.

The proof you seek is on the trauma ward of every hospital. There are hundreds of brain damaged people who show reduced intelligence, awareness or any other measure of "consciousness".

Do you mean consciousness or do you mean the mind?

[/quote]

Can you prove any of these romantic Cinderella stories of yours ?
What , on earth , are you talking about ?
You have just landed , Mr. magical Eagle , so , you have missed a lot here :
See the previous posts where we talked about damaged brains, the magical "emergence " trick ...........

You haven't answered any of my questions regarding your reductionist magical claims that have nothing to do with science whatsoever , just with materialism  as a world view  in science .
See above : concerning that interesting book of philosopher Thomas Nagel also : you can read his displayed introduction to that interesting book of his .
I certainly cannot understand the fact that relatively intelligent people such as yourselves can  believe in that materialistic reductionist neo-Darwinian magical "emergence " trick obvious non-sense , come on : amazing : see that book .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

For those reductionists here who might happen to use their critical minds  regarding their reductionist magical non-sense , the following ,concerning Thomas Nagel 's books for free :

http://bookos.org/g/Thomas%20Nagel