Recently I read an interview with a neuroscientist (Nikolay Kukushkin) who was promoting his new book. Kukushkin was trying to make it sound like he has some understanding of how minds like ours appeared and how bodies like ours ever appeared. But he said nothing persuasive on this matter.
Addressing the question of "How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?" Kukushkin gives an answer that is utterly vacuous, as well as being sometimes nonsensical. Here are the first two paragraphs:
"I was having this debate with a philosopher colleague [who questioned], 'How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?' But to me, it's not a problem. Physics is directional — a rock 'wants' to fall down. This potential energy is the gravitation of a system towards an energy minimum, and I think everything is that. It's just a level of complexity. A rock gravitates towards an energy minimum; for a rock, it just means falling down. A cell gravitates towards an energy minimum; for the cell, it might mean predicting the environment in some way. You get to a brain, you form these predictive expectations — millions of neurons talking to one another.
I think what puzzles them [proponents of the top-down definition] is the very directionality of a system towards some state, because they think the default is no directionality. I don't think there is such a default. I think physics, the entire universe, is directionality. Time is this unit of one thing leading to another, this unit of causality. So, if everything consists of these grains of causality, then I don't think it's that puzzling that we are driven towards anything, that there is some sort of drive of the system towards a state."
What utter nonsense. No, rocks do not "want" to fall down. And the fact that rocks sometimes fall down in rock slides has nothing whatsoever to do with how human mental phenomena could arise from a brain, particularly because human mental phenomena are a huge diversity of capabilities almost infinitely impressive than a rock falling down.
I will not quote the next two paragraphs of Kukushkin's answer to the question of "How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?" If you read the interview, you will see it is every bit as vacuous as the two paragraphs quoted above. Kukushkin sounds just exactly like someone who has not got any sensible-sounding tale to tell as to how a brain could produce a mind.
Later in the interview, Kukushkin gives answers just as bad. Talking about computers he says this: "First they form their 'beliefs,' and then they start generating predictions based on those beliefs." No, computers do not have anything like beliefs. Kukushkin says, "The more friends you have, the bigger your brain has to be, because it's a really uniquely complicated operation to perceive the intentions and the motivations and the emotions of this large group of people." He calls this "the social brain hypothesis" and claims "It's an explanation for why we're so smart." This does not make any sense as an explanation for why humans are so smart.
Human brain size has not changed since a time of about 50,000 years ago, when humans lived in very small social groups, such as a small group of about ten people living in a cave. It is true that building cities and living in large social groups of thousands of people requires more intelligence than just being a cave man. But it was not at all a case that human brain size sharply increased as human social group size increased. Humans had brains just as big as we now have before any cities or towns were built, when the average human social group was tiny. So "you need more intelligence to live in cities" is not any explanation for why humans would be smart enough to build cities and live well in cities.
Kukushkin notes that humans have unique language abilities, but he says nothing substantive to explain how such abilities could have arose, stating only this:
"There is no equivalent, as far as we know, in the animal kingdom of an infinitely generative system of communication. It's passed from human to human, like this cognitive virus, and there must have been a moment when this passage has become stable — when it took off, essentially. We have this natural tendency to create a language and pass it on....I think that the reason why we developed this language is fundamentally social. We wouldn't have developed it if we were solitary creatures."
Neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation for the origin of language, and their failure to explain such a thing is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting their underlying dogmas. Humans have all sorts of mental capabilities that neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists cannot credibly explain, partially because they are of no use to creatures living in the wild. Some of those capabilities are mentioned below.
Kukushkin repeats the groundless fairly tale of endosymbiosis, the claim that the first eukaryotic cell arose from some miraculous accident in which much simpler prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell. Nothing like that has ever been observed by humans, and scientists actually ack any credible explanation for the origin of eukaryotic cells. Kukushkin then offers this explanation for how there could have occurred an evolution from single-celled life to large, complex visible organisms:
'That gives eukaryotes access to unprecedented quantities of energy and sets in motion this evolutionary arms race. They get greedy on this energy; they build up these massive, impressive, energetically expensive cells. But now these cells depend on a constant supply of prey, of somebody to eat. It will perish unless you keep adding more energy, and everybody else around you has the same problem. They need to eat and not be eaten. That sets in motion this evolution of even more complicated cells, of even more convoluted defense or offense, and then teeth and claws and shells."
The appearance of multicellular visible organisms with very complex anatomy is actually not something we should ever expect to occur from the mere existence of single-cell microscopic life. The fact that individual cells "need to eat and not to be eaten" does nothing to explain how there might arise fantastically organized visible creatures containing hierarchical organizations of cells such as mobile organisms with claws and shells.
Whenever Darwinists refer to an "arms race" in discussing evolution, they are using a very misleading analogy. An arms race is when the leaders of two different nations purposefully decide to improve their weapons, to try to engineer and manufacture weapons so that one nation surpasses the weapon systems of the other nation. It is never legitimate to refer to such an arms race (an example of purposeful design) when referring to blind, unguided processes of nature such as Darwinian evolution.
Kukushkin engages below in some "something arose because it was useful" reasoning, which is never a convincing explanation of why some great biological innovation could have arisen:
"But as your organisms become more complex, they become really vulnerable. We started investing into more ways for these organisms to avoid danger, to be self-guided. Maybe to prevent their accidental death, give them a brain to make sure that it can tell where danger is, and so it can avoid that death."
Kukushkin gives this very vacuous attempt to explain "how you eventually get to us."
"The whole point of a brain is that it needs to learn for itself. Once you create that, this organism starts thinking for itself. It starts acquiring its own motivations that are not prescribed in genes. It starts developing its own thoughts, and that's how you eventually get to us."
The interview ends with Kukushkin stating one line that is extremely false, followed by another line that contradicts the first line. He states this:
"There wasn't anything special about our lineage, our line of evolution, compared to everything else. Eukaryotes compared to bacteria and archaea are special in precisely the same way as humans are special amongst all the creatures around us."
The first line makes the gigantically false claim that "there wasn't anything special" about humans. The second line contradicts that line by suggesting that the difference between human and other organisms is like the difference between eukaryotic cells and the prokaryotic cells of bacteria, which are cells gigantically simpler.
Kukushkin's interview is the most unconvincing mess. Nowhere does he give any statement that sounds like he has the least bit of a convincing explanation for the physical wonders of biology or the mental wonders of human minds.
No comments:
Post a Comment