Sir Francis is simply stating one of the many forms of the inner — too often unrecognised — incoherence of evolutionary materialism as an account of mind and reasoning.

For, if in the end, all traces to chance plus mechanical necessity acting on and through space-time and matter-energy, there is no dynamical basis for a credible mind. Thence, self-referential incoherence and self-contradiction or absurdity as you note.

(My just linked gives several ways this can, does and has happened over the 150 years or so of the modern emergence and dominance of this view.)

GEM of TKI

Duly noted.

I had no derogatory intent in this post. My comment was to imply (apparently without success), when addressing conscious issues, particularly those concerning values or ethics, Crick’s statement (thank you j):

“your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.

leads me to wonder why his statement can be considered authoritative. It is a bit unnerving to read in such strong language someone whose intent, as his was, to destroy the notion of religious belief. Like the Logical Positivists, asserting that no proposition can be true unless it could be empirically verified, his proposition is either true, or it collapses by virtue of his own argument. Were those just his nerve cells and their associated molecules talking or is this statement empirically verifiable?

I have not read every ream of text written on the subject; but I do have difficulty believing something to be true objectively if nothing can be found to be objectively true — particularly if the propostion is nothing more than a material consequence of some apparent unknown cause.

A ban for ReligionProf . . . for what?

It might be useful if someone in authority here could briefly explain why this individual’s particular contributions on this thread resulted in termination.

If this is meant to be a place to discuss ID in terms of science, then what could possibly be objectionable about dissenting views, set out articuately and politely?

I’m far from an authority here, DaveScot has his own reasons for banning RP, but from what I observed in the few posts of his I read, he was not very polite and not willing to discuss anything other than how ID is not science.

In this thread alone, he insisted on not reading anything on this site that contradicted his disbelief of mind/brain duality and instead kept implying that anyone who didn’t agree with him was ignorant (i.e., not “well-informed”).

He chose to keep insulting people like Dr. Dembski, Ms. O’Leary, and the other knowledgable people who contribute to this site by implying they were ill-informed – not just in this thread, either. Thus, instead of being a respectful guest, he chose to be boorish and was banned because of it.

Good, then you can stop being so defensive of him, since he confessed to be ignorant of genetics and the mechanics of DNA replication.

If he didn’t share your collegiate rubber-stamped worldview, you’d be busting on him for his lack of biology education and ties to religion instead of trolling me.

And I’ll, email you a copy of my degree in Genetics if you like.

A scanned check stub from your current employer will suffice, thanks. Otherwise, you’re just another cookie-cutter wet-behind-the-ears egotistical troll who just as well claim that he’s the King of Spain.

And I’ll, email you a copy of my degree in Genetics if you like.

It might be useful if someone in authority here could briefly explain why this individual’s particular contributions on this thread resulted in termination. If this is meant to be a place to discuss ID in terms of science, then what could possibly be objectionable about dissenting views, set out articuately and politely?

You’ll need to pick someone other than a self-confessed layman, then, since you have implied that laymen know nothing.

Also, you’ll have to prove you’re not a layman yourself.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t be surprised if you share an IP address with our dear ReligionProf, considering how sensitive you are over my simplistic rebuttal. Either that or you’re some student of his.

Edelman calls his hypothesis “neural Darwinism.” Darwinian evolution, being based entirely on the combination of chance (variations) and necessity (natural selection) can’t generate complex specified information, but intelligent agency (human consciousness) can.
__________

Alternatively:

Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (1994), p. 354:

Certain other ideas have been suggested, such as those of Gerald Edelman in his recent book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992) (and his earlier trilogy [including Neural Darwinism (1987)]), in which it is proposed that rather than having rules of a Hebbian type, a form of ‘Darwinian’ principle operates within the brain, enabling it to improve its performance continually by means of a kind of natural selection principle that governs these connections… However, these processes, as they are presently conceived, are still treated in a classical and computational way. Indeed, Edelman and his colleagues have constructed a series of computationally controlled devices (called DARWIN I, II, III, IV, etc.) that are intended to simulate, in increasing orders of complexity, the very kinds of procedure that he is proposing lie at the basis of mental action… It does not matter how different in detail such a scheme might be from other computational procedures. It still comes under the heading of those [concepts refuted by] the arguments [presented earlier in the book]. Those arguments alone render it exceedingly improbable that anything that is solely of this nature can provide an actual model of the conscious mind.

__________

toc (26): Francis Crick addressed this issue by declaring (loosely stated here) that human consciousness is nothing more than the activity of molecules colliding against each other.

For the record:

Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994):

your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Apologies, bad grammar from bad editing. That’s what I get for banging out a reply just before quitting time.

Which side leads to fascism…

“DON’T TASE ME BRO!”