As Gazzaniga explains with clarity and understated authority, this is based on a false picture of nature operating in a simple “bottom up” way. This kind of crude reductionism has been superseded by an understanding of “complex systems” and “emergent properties”, which gives a scientific explanation of how wholes can be more than the sums of their parts. For example, when atoms get together to form an eagle, the animal has properties such as colour, consciousness and sense perception that do not appear in the list of the properties of atoms. But what’s more, you can’t explain these emergent properties by breaking down the workings of the bird into the workings of atoms. Nor can you build up the other way: you could not predict the properties of birds from the laws of physics and the properties of the atoms that comprise them.
The vital upshot of this is that it is just wrong to think of causation as all occurring at the fundamental, subatomic level of organisation. As an emergent property, conscious thought can affect how we can behave, without us having to postulate some kind of weird, non-material soul. We are built of atoms, but we are neither controlled by them nor control them from the outside. Control is exerted by the whole system, not by its parts or anything external to it.
Apart from the fact that the phrase "weird, non-material soul" suggests not much understanding of what the term soul means, the question remains as to how these properties emerged. Given the Big Bang, by the way, it would seem that this whole material world emerged from something non-material.
Actually, you CAN explain the properties of birds from the laws of physics, specifically the properties of weight, aerodynamics, and flight itself. There are mass/weight-to-lift ratios that are the same for birds and airplanes. It's how we learned to make airplanes, by following those same laws of physics.
ReplyDeleteEmergent order, self-organizing systems are perfectly explainable by looking at the laws of physics and chemistry, the properties of how certain solutions to molecules are more likely than others, based precisely on the atomic properties.
This discussion seems completely unaware of molecular physics, chemistry, and other basic laws of physics. (On the atomic and molecular level, chemistry IS physics. I learned that in college.)