Professor Plumb, you have only restated an argument already made, adding only that an authority shares your opinion. The tacit assumption of his concluding remarks is that no causal mechanism between brain-processes and mind-processes is required because one is the same as the other.
Meanwhile his next sentence injects a straw man into this debate:
Mind creating matter has not been part of this discussion. No one denies the intimate connection between minds and brains. The authority you cited does not actually address the full relationship between mental events and brain events. He only looks for efficient causes and observes only third-party physical facts. Empirical study of the brain takes for granted the formal relationships, logical relations, and assigned values (all immaterial) that allow us to feel, think about, and will to act upon what we observe.
In the example you provided, physical events produce both physical and mental effects. Following the initial physical cause you get both a second physical event and mental one. Now you have two potential causes, one mental and the other physical, for the next in line physical event and its associated mental one. This means one of the following:
1. Mental properties are side-effects without causal import. This means the feeling of being alive, making choices, and contemplating ideas have no power. And because mental processes are inert they can have neither function nor use.
2. A pre-existing harmony exists between mind-states and brain-states. This creates two parallel chains of causation that co-exist but do not interact.
But there is a third option that atheists refuse to consider and dismiss out-of-hand, because that is one that undermines their materialist worldview.
3. Causation, broadly defined, goes both ways. Mental causes inform physical effects, just as physical causes constrain mental effects.
Because this third option does not restrict causality to one direction, from physical cause to mental effect, it allows the possibility of interaction between two real and distinct realities, a materially substantial one and an immaterial formal one.
Quote:…neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences.
Meanwhile his next sentence injects a straw man into this debate:
Quote:…the hypothesis that consciousness creates matter (does not) hold equal standing (as physicalist theories do)
Mind creating matter has not been part of this discussion. No one denies the intimate connection between minds and brains. The authority you cited does not actually address the full relationship between mental events and brain events. He only looks for efficient causes and observes only third-party physical facts. Empirical study of the brain takes for granted the formal relationships, logical relations, and assigned values (all immaterial) that allow us to feel, think about, and will to act upon what we observe.
In the example you provided, physical events produce both physical and mental effects. Following the initial physical cause you get both a second physical event and mental one. Now you have two potential causes, one mental and the other physical, for the next in line physical event and its associated mental one. This means one of the following:
1. Mental properties are side-effects without causal import. This means the feeling of being alive, making choices, and contemplating ideas have no power. And because mental processes are inert they can have neither function nor use.
2. A pre-existing harmony exists between mind-states and brain-states. This creates two parallel chains of causation that co-exist but do not interact.
But there is a third option that atheists refuse to consider and dismiss out-of-hand, because that is one that undermines their materialist worldview.
3. Causation, broadly defined, goes both ways. Mental causes inform physical effects, just as physical causes constrain mental effects.
Because this third option does not restrict causality to one direction, from physical cause to mental effect, it allows the possibility of interaction between two real and distinct realities, a materially substantial one and an immaterial formal one.
