[talk] The Study that is a Threat to Materialist Beliefs

For those that are interested, there is a draft of the lecture introducing the topic "Irreducible Mind" available here;

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~thegroundoffaith/Introduction.htm

I'm just reading through this now and seeing a few points that I'm not sure I agree with. Hopefully, I'll respond later today.

Only a 'few'? :P

Is there any chance of recording the talk so that people who cannot be there may hear it?

Embarrassingly, it appears that they speaker is basing most of their talk on a logical fallacy. That being Ad Ignorantiam.

Ad ignorantiam
The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don't know that it isn't true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.

I'm hoping that I'm wrong and that there will be more to this talk than claims about how much "materialistic science" doesn't know. If they're basing the bulk of their talk on this then the whole thing is a waste of time.

Points 9 & 10 are telling.

9. Materialists proclaim the non-existence of mind apart from the physical body, the non-reality of paranormal phenomena, the illusoriness of all religion. They claim this as scientific fact.
10. Are they correct? Can they prove scientifically that there is nothing but (lifeless, mindless) matter. They cannot. Tangible matter consists of atomic and subatomic particles, which along with electricity, and the radiation spectrum that includes infra-red, visible, and ultra-violet light, are Energy in varying states. We can describe what energy does, but no one knows what it is in itself. We cannot say that it is "dead" or "alive". The nature of energy is not a closed question.

Does science really claim what is in point 9? That's a absolute firm claim and my understanding of science is that it tends to avoid firm claims like this. After all, it only takes one experiment to prove something wrong. Admittedly, at that point science corrects itself and is right again, but that's beside the point...

Point 10 is where I see the Ad Ignorantiam fallacy rearing it's head. They're basically saying that because science can't prove the absence of a separate mind, therefor there must be one. Or am I reading too much into this?

As far as the claim that "no one knows what it is in itself" that's just plain wrong and shows a severe lack of understanding and/or education.

From point 11 on it starts heading towards the Woo. Referring to energy as "the mind at work".

The draft goes on to say that "IM";

...examines scientifically many dimensions of the paranormal, showing the likely reality of an afterlife, and the possibility that the physical and material is a product of the invisible and spiritual.

I'd be interested in seeing what they refer to when they say "examines scientifically". Given the nature of things paranormal/spiritual these are typically untestable and therefore don't lend themselves to scientific inquiry.

I'll be interested in seeing the data, the methodology and the equipment used. However, this talk isn't going to be the place for it I suspect.

I don't have high hopes for this talk unfortunately.

Interesting, the thing about point 9 is that science doesn't claim that. Putting aside various philosophical positions, what it does say is there is no evidence for claims such as for the existence of a mind separate from the body, paranormal phenomena and deities so the probability of them actually being in existence approaches zero.

Positive claims can be made and tested in this regard, for instance there is considerable evidence the mind is a function of the brain and doesn't have an existence outside of the body that survives physical death. The science facts (such as they are) is that there is no evidence of brain activity past physical death and that mind function exactly correlates with physical function. For instance if you have a stroke affecting the right hand side of the brain the diminished function such hemiplegia (left sided paralysis) or damage to speech (Broca's area) will correlate with damage to the brain. Your sense of yourself being inside your body appears to reside in the frontal lobe of the brain, and we can look at numerous examples of accidents or disease processes affecting brain function and altering fundamental characteristics of a person like personality - Phineas Gage being one famous example. You'd expect otherwise with the claim of existence of mind distinct from the physical body. I certainly think with the development of such technology as fMRI scanning, you could most definitely develop hypotheses and test them.

The representation of the position of materialists as there is nothing but "lifeless, mindless matter" isn't what it's all about as far as I can recall. This is an example of a person coming to a set perspective and then searching for the evidence that supports it rather than being open from the outset to anything and everything on the topic. The leads on that if what they research doesn't fit, it's discarded or altered.