Human Consciousness Demands a Creator
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for A Creator, chapter 10. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
Ray Kurzweil, American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist has said, “The intelligence of machines will exceed human intelligence early in this century. By intelligence, I include all of the diverse and subtle ways in which humans are intelligent - including musical and artistic aptitude, creativity, physically moving and even responding to emotion…. They will claim to be people, and to have the full range of emotional and spiritual experiences that people claim to have.”
Basically, his claim is that once a machine can be built with the processing power of the human brain, then consciousness will have been achieved. But many scientists and philosophers are convinced the laws of physics and chemistry cannot explain human consciousness. A nonmaterial reality called the “soul,” “mind,” or “self” accounts for human sentience.
So what is consciousness? It's what you’re aware of when you introspect, when you pay attention to what’s going on inside of you - the sensations, thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs and free choices that make us alive and aware.
What if consciousness didn’t exist? Apples would still be red, but there would be no awareness of red or any sensations of red.
So how might we define the soul then? It is the ego, the “I,” or the self, and it contains our consciousness and animates our body.
But what if physicalism was true? Consciousness wouldn’t really exist because there would be no such thing as conscious states that must be described from a first-person point of view. You could capture the entire universe on a graph, including your brain and kidneys and so forth because if everything is physical, it could be described entirely from a third-person point of view. Yet we know we have first-person subjective points of view - so physicalism can’t be true.
If physicalism was true, there could be no free will. Why? Because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. So if I’m a material object, everything I do is fixed by my environ-ment, my genetics and so forth. During the Vietnam War, based on B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, the north was repeatedly bombed. But there was more to the Vietnamese than their physical brains responding to stimuli.
If physicalism was true, there would be no disembodied intermediate state. According to Christianity, when we die, our souls leave our bodies and await the later resurrection of our bodies from the dead. We don’t cease to exist; our souls are living on. Studies of near-death experiences would seem to support the Christian claim, and we know Jesus was put to death and seen alive later by credible witnesses.
But we have an inner and private mind, providing evidence that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical process of the brain. Scientific evidence corroborates what we already intuitively know. A neurosurgeon electrically stimulated part of the brain of a patient and caused movement, but the patient said, “I didn’t do that.” This demonstrates that the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body. The neurosurgeon found that no matter how much he probed the cerebral cortex, there is no place where stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.
If physicalism were true, from the patient's perspective when his brain was stimulated, he would believe he decided at that moment to raise his hand. And a study of the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain discovered the mind has causal powers independent of the brain’s activities.
Philosophically, I know there are things true of my consciousness that aren’t true of anything physical. For example, some of my thoughts have the attribute of being true, but some also have the attribute of being false. If I think of my beloved Citadel Bulldogs as national collegiate football champions, for example, I most definitely possess a false thought.
But no scientist can look at my brain and say, “Oh that particular brain state is true and that one false.” So there are things true of my conscious states that are not true of my brain states, so they can’t be the same thing. Nothing in my brain is about anything, but some of my mental states are. You can’t point to a part of my brain and say that’s about the Citadel Bulldogs, or that's about ice cream. My consciousness is inner and private to me.
By simply introspecting, I have a way of knowing what’s happening in my mind that is not available to you, my doctor, or a neurosurgeon. For example, when researchers first observed rapid eye movement during their subjects' sleep, how did they learn it has to do with dreaming? They had to wake them up and ask! It was information only available to them.
So the scientist can know about the brain by studying it, but he can’t know about the mind without asking the person to reveal it, because conscious states have the feature of being inner and private, but the brain’s states do not. Just ask anyone who claims otherwise why psychiatrists have to ask their patients rather than just scan their brains (or police or intelligence investigators). Why is there such a thing as a lie detector test unless there are inner thoughts and feelings to which others do not have access?
Why should we believe the soul is real? We’re aware that we’re different from our consciousness and our body. We know we’re beings who have consciousness and a body, but we’re not merely the same thing as our conscious life or our physical life. There was a woman in a terrible accident - she lost all her memories. She didn’t believe she had been married and lost a good portion of her personality. So she had totally different memories and didn’t have the same personality, BUT! She was the same person! If we were just our consciousness, then when/if it changed, then we’d be different people.
The same goes for our bodies. An epileptic had 53% of his brain removed. No one said, “We have 47% of a person here.” Personhood must be rooted in something else. A person can’t be divided into pieces, but his brain and body can be. That means I can’t be the same thing as my body. A long time ago I was a police officer. One of our cops on a motorcycle was injured in a vehicle accident and lost an arm. We didn't refer to him as 7/8s of a person. He was still officer Smith.
So back to the computer issue. Computers have artificial intelligence, not intelligence. There’s no “what it’s like to be a computer” - no “insides,” no self-awareness, no first-person point of view, no insights into problems. A computer can be programmed to engage in behavior, but consciousness is not the same as behavior. Consciousness is being alive; it’s what causes behavior in truly conscious beings. Electric circuitry is what causes “behavior” (pseudo-behavior) in a computer.
Let's consider the example of a computer bat vs. a real bat. Suppose we know everything it is possible to know and can even program the computer bat so that we know what it would do when released into the environment. Now suppose we know everything about the real bat - blood system, nervous system, brain, heart, lungs - and can predict what it will do when released into the environment. There’s still one thing we wouldn’t know: what it’s like to be a bat! What it’s like to hear, to feel, to experience sound and color - that stuff involves the “insides” of the bat, its point of view.
So computers might be able to imitate intelligence, but they won’t ever have consciousness. We mustn’t confuse behavior with what it’s like to be alive, awake, and sentient. A future superintelligent computer might be able to imitate intelligence, but it won’t ever have consciousness. It might even be programmed to say it’s conscious or even behave as if it is, but it can never truly become conscious, because consciousness is an immaterial entity apart from the brain.
And what about animals? In several places the Bible uses the word “soul” or “spirit” when discussing animals (Gen. 1:30; Lev. 24:18; Ecc. 3:19; and Rev. 8:9). They have consciousness and points of view. But the animal soul is much simpler than the human soul (I tend to think in terms of spirit). The human soul is capable of free moral action.
I think the animal soul is determined - basically stimulus/ response. Augustine said animals have thoughts, but they don’t think about their thinking. While we have beliefs about our beliefs, animals don’t. The human soul is much more complicated because we are made in the image of God, so we have self-reflection and self-thinking.
Evolution can’t account for human consciousness. You can’t get something from nothing; you can't get the immaterial from a purely physical universe. How do you get something totally different - conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures - from materials that don’t have that? But also consider this: If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.
What about the emergence of the mind as a natural byproduct of our brain’s complexity? There are four problems with that. First, they are no longer treating matter as brute stuff that can be completely described by the laws of physics and chemistry. They are attributing spooky, soulish or mental potentials to matter. That’s no longer naturalism but panpsychism - the view that matter contains proto-mental states. That's closer to theism than atheism.
Second, they are stuck with determinism. If mind emerged from matter without the direction of a superior Intelligence, why should we trust anything from the mind as being rational or true?
Third, if mind emerged from matter without the direction of a superior Intelligence, there's no reason to trust anything from the mind as being rational or true, especially in the area of theoretical thinking.
And finally, there would be no unified self. Brain function is spread throughout the brain, so if you lose part of it, then that function is lost. Using the earlier example of the epileptic, you would have 47% of a person.
These obvious truths have led atheist/Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse to ask, “Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have an answer to this…. The point is that there is no scientific answer.”