Neurosurgeon and Engineer Critique a Materialist Theory of Consciousness
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ID The Future listeners now get to enjoy two episodes each month from our sister podcast Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. The Mind Matters News podcast brings you insight from computer scientists, engineers, inventors, neurosurgeons, and other experts who bring sanity to the conversation about natural and artificial intelligence, going beyond the hype to explore the undercurrents of these important ideas. And although the Mind Matters News podcast will not often explicitly discuss intelligent design, it regularly explores the nature of intelligence, the origin of information, and the things that make us uniquely human, all concepts that are central to the theory of intelligent design. Enjoy today’s offering of Mind Matters News!
On this episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Robert Marks and Dr. Michael Egnor to the show to critique Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a popular mathematical model that attempts to explain consciousness through computational complexity.
Dr. Marks levies his experience in computer engineering to explain the computational impossibility of the theory. He explains why the theory is virtually untestable and why it borders on pseudoscience. Dr. Egnor, meanwhile, draws on his extensive experience as a neurosurgeon to highlight the problems he sees with Integrated Information Theory. Chief among them is a significant medical flaw: patients with a condition known as hydranencephaly, who lack the very brain hemispheres IIT requires for consciousness, are nonetheless fully awake and conscious.
Marks and Egnor also take time to challenge the materialist assertion that human beings are merely computers made of meat. They refute the idea that simply increasing the quantity of a physical system’s complexity will eventually bring about a qualitative leap in consciousness. Egnor shares evidence from neuroscience and his experiences in neurosurgery to show that while basic perceptions like movement and sight are tied to the brain, abstract concepts such as logic, mathematics, and mercy have no physical location in the cortex, showing that the mind and the brain exist separately and work independently as well as in unison to give us the consciousness we all enjoy and often take for granted.
Dig Deeper
- Read the paper by Drs. Marks and Egnor that inspired this conversation!
- Enjoy more episodes of Mind Matters News here.