Signalled Diffusion Book II: Exponentiating Diffusion

Book II of my "Signalled Diffusion" project can be downloaded here. Book I can be downloaded from a link in this post. Below I reproduce the introduction to  book II. 

Introduction

This is Book II in my current series about diffusion. It investigates the possible meanings of equations of the form

…where  the "house" symbol represents the multidimensional equivalent of the "Del" operator.

In interpreting the meaning of equations of this kind my concern is to investigate the possible sub-microscopic mechanisms which will return equations like the above, at least as an approximation. But this logic cannot be reversed: This equation doesn’t logically entail the submicroscopic approximations from which it is derived. That is, we have to hypothesise these mechanisms and then derive the equation; the mechanisms themselves don’t necessarily follow from the equation. Therefore this equation  only constitutes evidence that these submicroscopic mechanisms are in operation and not proof.

As I said in book I my sights are on the case where  the equation becomes a quantum equation: that is when the diffusion constant D, and also V,  incorporate the imaginary number “i”.

The Creative Forgery of Young Earthism

The creation of the Hitler diaries would have entailed a creation process and therefore a history, but it wasn't the history the dairies purported to tell: They were forgeries. According to the logic of  young earthism the creation is effectively a forgery

Somebody recently asked me the following question: 

I have a friend who, for some reason, is friendly to the idea that God might have created our universe already aged by a few million years, so to speak - so that the universe looks 14 billion years old, but if at the start of creation God kind of zapped it into existence at several billion years old already then it just looks older but is actually much younger.

 Obviously this is a distortion of the true picture - but I wonder if you have any thoughts on this and/or previous blogs on it, because I seem to recall you writing about matters like that before, where creationists claim similar things re the changing speed of light, a universe that God has made look older than it is.

My reply is given below: It includes some clarifying changes and actually concatenates two emails.

***

This is less of an issue than it was in the late 60s and early 70s when young earthism had its revival. For example in the early 70s my wife was told by a young earthist that God placed the fossils in the rocks "as is". The 1961 book "The Genesis Flood" which I read in the mid 70s tells us that God might have created light from the stars in transit.

But young earthists have been trying move away from this "appearance of age" creation (Sometimes euphemistically called "mature creation"); they will admit:
a) It is subversive of science and can block all attempts to do science.
b) Far worse, it questions God's creative integrity.
This "mature creation" can be likened to the person who wrote the fake Hitler Diaries - it's all a lie.

Hence, for modern young earthists much effort is put into flood geology and star light theories in order to try to give scientific account as to why things are the way they are. These theories have come to grief but at least a protagonist can engage them polemically whereas the guy who just claims that it was all created "as is" is difficult to argue with. But even if God created a fake diary it would still have a history in so far as it would require God to assemble it in his mind - hence you can't get away from history as an assembly path.  See here

But one finds that in the final analysis even those young earthists who try do science have to eventually fall back on creation "as is" and are open to being accused of the "Hitler Diary" syndrome. (See my links below)

Science is a data dot joining exercise: We see a pattern of "data dots" and attempt to complete the pattern with a theoretical narrative which joins the data samples into a coherent whole.  We attempt predictions of further dots and those predictions, if correct, point to the correctness of our dot joining theories. But all this is based on the assumption that the data dots are not misleading us; no problem for a non-fundamentalist Christian who believes in God's creative integrity. But it is a problem to a fundie who is effectively positing huge arbitrary holes in the anticipated background structure joining the data dots*. This is basically what the "appearance of age/mature creation" wallahs are trying to tells us; namely that the world is a forgery! I don't buy it!

Some of my writings on the subject can be seen in the links below.

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/01/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/02/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/04/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/03/mangling-science-part-1-kens-can-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/04/mangling-science-part2-opening-up-kens.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/10/mangling-science-continuing-our-diet-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/02/mangling-science-part-4-worms-all-way.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/12/mangling-science-part-5-two-kinds-of.html

Footnote

* Notice that this back of the envelope sketch of science doesn't recognise the distinction "historical science vs observational science" - the latter is a misleading fundamentalist trope. Science is about timeless patterns and in the exercise of all science both history and observation are always implicit. This is no surprise because every object we observe and study can only be done at the receiving end of  signals transmitted by the object. These signals inevitably have a history of travel.  However, there is such a thing as epistemic distance and this distance varies; some objects are closer to our scrutiny than others, some objects have a greater density of data dots than others and some objects have a greater complexity of behaviour than others: These are all factors that impact epistemic distance, making an object more or less amenable to our epistemology.

The fundamentalist attempt to solve the star light problem by positing a coordinate system which entails the instantaneous arrival of star light at our earthly doorstep (See links above for more on this "solution") immediately creates an issue with the historical science vs observational science dichotomy: This follows because it raises a conundrum as to whether astronomy is to be classified as "historical" or "observational" science!

A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part1: Xenotron vs Paleontological Man.

 

1984: Xenotron's video composer work stations for newspaper page and ad make-up

Between  February 1984 and September 1991 I worked as a software engineer for a UK company called Xenotron. This company was manufacturing and marketing proprietary desk top and plinth computers for the interactive make up of Ads and Newspaper pages. This was done WYSIWYG style by moving around and tweaking blocks of texts on screen. At the time this was an innovative hardware/software combination and a revolution for litho-printers (perhaps comparable to the invention of the printing press?). Xenotron products took the market by storm, so when I joined the company in 1984 it was riding the crest of the "we-did-it-first" wave. But the creative destruction of market dynamics which had brought Xenotron into existence ensured that the Xenotron itself was up for eventual destruction and the last remnants of the company were wound up in 1991. I am in the process of creating documents which tell the Xenotron story via newspaper clippings, memos, brochure photos and notes. The first part of this three part story can be read here. 

The story I tell reveals just what creative destruction feels like for the lives of its human players, players who may find themselves on the back foot and perhaps not that well adapted to the circumstances creative destruction throws at them. After all (wo)man is a creature whose mode of society, for many thousands of years, was that of the hunter-gatherer. Small hunter-gatherer communities lived in harmony with nature in so far as they could take from nature what she offered with little or no environmentally detrimental effects. But that environment could be cruel and ruthless and this helped ensure that the members of these communities valued each other because each member had their recognised role in providing much needed community support. I suspect that inter-tribal conflicts were fairly minimal in such an underpopulated world where in any case conflicts were pointlessly wasteful when there was so much that needed doing just to survive. But all in all the human animal was undoubtedly well adapted for the hunter-gatherer life style, a style which lasted for thousands of years. I guess that for the people of these primitive communities expectations were seldom crushed because they hadn't been conditioned to expect much from life other than food, shelter, reproduction and above all appreciative human company. There was no time or space for listlessness, depression, disaffection and dissent from one's community; they knew how to enjoy and be grateful for basic pleasures and probably felt fulfilled when they had won these pleasures.

But I don't want to paint too rosy a picture of hunter-gatherer society: They were dirt poor by our standards even though, perhaps, surprisingly happy and contented. They had short rough lives as they faced the ravages of the environment and illness. What made it all tolerable is that they knew (and expected) nothing better. In comparison many of us in the West live like entitled aristocrats having (and expecting) riches and privileges that our ancient forebears couldn't even imagine. But a deep sense of expectation fulfilled, social belonging, tribal identification and social recognition & status, all of which are so important to human feelings of well-being, often allude us. Citizenship has always been a dubious concept since the first cities.

I'm not anti-capitalist or anti-market, but as for the realities of hunter-gatherer life I try to avoid a romanticised vision and instead endeavour to be cognizance of the our society's downsides: Free market industrial scale communities are not entirely successful at satisfying all the needs of the human heart and delivering contentment. Instead, as Marx observed, capitalism has a tendency to breed alienation and dissent in spite of its riches. This is not surprising given that agricultural man is less than 10,000 years old, urban man 4000 years old and industrial and hi-tech man (developments we can thank the free market for) has only been around for a mere 200 to 300 years.  In comparison hunter-gathering was a way of life for perhaps a 100 thousand years or more. Which life style is our psychology best adapted to?

It is not surprising that a creature which battles with selfishness, epistemic challenges and social alienation in a world where expectations are sky-high and where zero sum games abound, some times finds contentment and fulfillment to be illusive. But to be fair modern humanity's relationship with rich market driven societies is ambivalent. On the one hand such societies provide opportunities to express ambition, creativity, and individuality. These rich societies can also satisfy human acquisitiveness and a need to achieve. Also, let's not forget the relatively secure environmental bubble in which we live in Western societies. On the other hand all this comes at the cost of economic instabilities, fractured community spirit, social alienation, purposelessness and boredom. Like the trench warfare of WWI times of stifling empty monotony are punctuated by times of unsettled terror. 

Some of the human ambivalence toward market driven technological society can be seen in the very human details of the Xenotron story where we see the needs of tribal affiliation and creativity initially provided for and yet ultimately tugged at by a wider market dynamic. As I always say,  technological capitalism has made us rich beyond the imagination of our forebears and has given us huge vistas of knowledge but the devil is found in the details.

The Incoherent Notions of Free Will and Determinism. Part III

Christian dualism is Christianity on the back foot

This is the third part of a three part series that discusses an article on "Free will and Determinism" which appeared in the November issue of Premier Christianity magazine. The article was written by Justin Brierley. Brierley is an otherwise respected Christian commentator but as it turned out his article is, as far as I'm concerned, "exhibit A" in the case against Christian dualism. The other parts of this series can be seen here and here.

Below I follow my usual practice of interleaving my comments between article quotes.

On subject of Calvinism Brierley comments as follows:

BRIERLEY: Can the person who commits a heinous offence be judged guilty of a crime if they were bound to act in such a way by divine decree of God? Indeed, it could be argued that God himself is more culpable than they are.

MY COMMENT: As I have said in the previous parts of this series,  just how humans chose to act, whether good or bad, has a kind of "pre-existance" in platonic space, the space of possible outcomes. Thus, given this space of potentiality the role of Divine sovereignty is that of either positively selecting the possibilities or allowing their emergence from platonic space into a reified cosmic story. This role makes me think twice about attributing Divine culpability to human activity; for that activity need not have been positively selected for by the Creator, but rather permitted. Looked at  like this we find a way of respecting both human responsibility and Divine sovereignty.

However, as I have already said we are still left with the age old theological conundrum over the existence of suffering and evil and why the Divine will should allow such to be reified. On this particular issue I can only direct the reader to the enormous body of theological literature which addresses this question. The only time I have addressed it is here.

Brierley now goes onto consider atheistic materialism:

BRIERLEY: ...in a purely naturalistic worldview, all that's really happening at a fundamental level is a variety of atoms bumping into other atoms, triggering electrochemical responses in the brain. What's more, because  the universe runs on the deterministic principle of cause and effect, all of those collisions were predetermined in the distant past. You and your beliefs  are a product of along chain of inevitable physical events.

MY COMMENT:  The deterministic principle of cause and effect? Sorry, I've never heard of it outside naive interpretations of physics! As I have already said in the previous parts, I fail to recognise Brieley's depiction of the physical regime. There have been some attempts to try to restore an underlying mathematical determinism to quantum theory but I'm not aware that these efforts have resulted in any successful predictions. Physics today is not about a cause & effect billiard ball mechanics but about the mathematical constraints on patterns of behaviour. Ally this to the inherent mathematical chaos of the physical regime and we find that Brierley's billiard ball model looks downright silly. 

In any case given that the cosmos comes with two perspectives  ( i..e. the first person and third person perspectives - that is, respectively, my view of myself and the third party's view of me) it is not immediately obvious why even a highly deterministic particulate third person account of human beings is anymore fundamental than the first person sense of choice; the first person perspective is irreducible and the third person account, in the final analysis, actually traces back to a first person's observations, perceptions and theories. The first person perspective cannot be factored out of science; first person observations are the corner stone of science. 

Continuing with his billiard ball paradigm Brierley talks of the processes in the brain as follows:

BRIERLEY: But the atoms [in the Brain] aren't doing any reasoning. It's all just a series of physical events - snooker balls bouncing off each other. They aren't the least bit interested in the truth or falsity of the thoughts they are producing.  As CS Lewis wrote "If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees".

MY COMMENT: To be frank I'm not sure whether Brierley is just acting as devil's advocate in using his snooker ball paradigm or whether he truly takes it seriously; certainly, sophisticated atheists would be unlikely to take it seriously, so who is Brierley being devil's advocate for?

Brierley's reasoning here doesn't work even for something as deterministic as a computer. Whether we are dealing with human minds or computers, we don't expect to find reasoning down at the microscopic level; the phenomenon of reasoning is a high level feature and as such it is only found in the organisation of the system. Moreover, if you are a theist, the idea of teleology isn't going to be the problem that it is to atheists and therefore teleologically speaking the high level organisation has meaning in so far as it has goals and purpose; we don't expect to find that meaning at the low level. Teleology throws an entirely new  light on the system; it might be just wind in the trees to atheists but it can't be so for the Christian. Like computers, human thinking systems are there for a purpose.

But really it is no surprise to me that the billiard/snooker ball paradigm, if used in a reductionist fashion,  induces disbelief; after all, if billiard balls are supposed to be the primary reality then where in such a system is conscious sentience to be found? The paradigm puts precedence on the third person perspective in a way which obscures the implicit presence of the first person perspective and may prompt the erroneous conclusion that there is no such thing as a first person perspective; in fact some atheists might even declare that consciousness is an illusion. If some people have tricked themselves into thinking that consciousness, the very core of personality, is an illusion what chance does the perception of God stand? For some Western Christians the only way to respond to this impasse is to become dualists and introduce the ghost that haunts the snooker ball machine! Christian dualism is Christianity on the back foot. 

Brierley goes on to make some comments about the problems atheism has with rationality: Viz: "The only way to guarantee that our reasoning  is itself rational is if there is a transcendent mind beyond the physical  stuff of nature. Getting rid of God turns out to create more problems than it solves". This I am inclined to agree with; without a sympathetic rational deity the rational integrity of the created order cannot be assumed.  But why determinism, or as Breirley appears to define it, "predictability",  should desecrate the sacredness of matter for Breieley I can only conclude that he really can't think round the intellectually toxic snooker ball paradigm. It is a paradigm that promotes disbelief in atheists and terror in the minds of Christians. Christian dualism is Christianity on the back foot. 

Brierley then moves his attention to Christian determinists: 

BRIERLEY:  Meanwhile Christian determinists are faced with the problem of how to rescue the concepts of love and justice from being rendered meaningless by a God who controls every thought and desire. 

MY COMMENT: This argument about the meaningless of love and justice in the face of Calvinism holds no weight at all given that at this stage Brierley's failure to clarify the free-will vs. determinism dichotomy renders it unintelligible and therefore itself meaningless. He has given us no coherent definition of either determinism or freewill and this means that no rational judgement regarding his dichotomy can be made.

In an attempt to make sense of what St Paul says in Romans 8:28-29 about the predestination of believers Brierley gives us this metaphor:

BRIERLEY: Imagine a Boeing 747 is scheduled  to fly from London  to New York.  Anyone who  gets on that plane  is 'predestined' to arrive at that destination. But the individuals who choose that flight  were not predestined to do so. Likewise all those who are in Christ are predestined to glory, but choosing whether or not to be part of that collective group is something within the free control  of each individual. 

MY COMMENT: This is a gallant try but there's a problem here: If we change the aircraft to a ship then we can see that it is possible for the passengers to bypass the "predestination" bit and jump over board and try their chances by swimming for it. After all, people do choose to leave the faith. So potentially there is the possibility that the boat, which presumably is predestined to arrive at its ultimate destination, arrives with only few on board. So whether or not passengers arrive at the predestined destination is a conditional rather than a "predetermined" certainty.  Quoting Romans 8:28-29:

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

So, should Paul have made it clear that the "predestination" of salvation is a conditional outcome and really only applies if you stay on board with the faith? In which case since we can't be sure whether people stay on board or not, then they have lost their "predestination" (since Brierley appears to equate "predestination" and "predictability").

It is doubtful whether God operates in the same time dimension as we do and therefore I don't here want to be drawn in to the question of exactly what Paul meant in these verses. But it looks to me as though the least we can say is that Paul had a strong view of God's sovereignty (see also Romans 9:14ff) which to me means that God at least has a veto power on what pops out of platonic space into reified reality.

I also raise here a point I raised in the first part about the apparent observer relativity of "determinism". If an agent (whether God or human) knows an outcome in advance, even though that outcome is part of a random sequence of events, that outcome then subsumes as a "determined" outcome as far as that agent is concerned (i.e. it is known). This means that, depending on one's informational frame of reference, even a so called "free-will" event (or a random event for that matter), if known in advance, becomes "determined" or "predestined" relative to the informed observer.

BRIERLEY: In the end we will always have imperfect knowledge of God who exists beyond temporal limitations. Paul recognised it: "for we see through a glass darkly" (1 Cor 13:12).

MY COMMENT: Well at last there is something here I can agree with; namely, that the subject has  a mystery at its core and this mystery is God himself.  I would say that that mystery is a facet of the age old problem of suffering and evil. For if God is absolute sovereign as he appears to be in the Bible why does he allow the emergence from platonic space creatures which so often make such bad decisions?

The only other mystery is this: Just what do theologians mean by freewill and predestination? There's quite a nifty tactic here: Offer a dichotomy with the suggestion that one is to endeavour to make a choice one way or the other, but leave terms so vague that it becomes all but impossible to successfully engage the question. One can then safely chose one of the options and cover one's tracks, smoke and mirrors style, by declaring that it is all rather too mysterious for us mortals to arrive at a clear resolution of the question and this excuses the theological obfuscation that tries to pass itself as reasoning.

***

I recently saw the following comment on the freewill question: Do I have freewill, if by free will I mean "The ability to do otherwise"?  The definition of freewill implicit here breaks down horribly; for using this definition I would have said that I certainly don't have the ability to act otherwise about certain things that I nevertheless very much chose to do: For example I chose not to kill my grandchildren. My mental set up is such that it is a very sound prediction that I would never chose to do such a thing; that is, while I remain sane it is all but impossible for me to chose to do otherwise. And yet in spite of this impossibility it is entirely meaningful to say that it is my choice not to carry out such acts. But on Brierley's understanding of determinism, an understanding which is apparently very closely related to predictability, there would be no "free will" being displayed here; the implications of Brierley's thinking is that in my cherishing of my grandchildren I'm a puppet in the grip of determinism!

There are a whole host of human actions and non-actions that are highly predictable and according to Brierley's concept of predictability as the anti-thesis of free-will, wouldn't therefore classify as "free choice". The further absurdity here is that even Divine choices, which are predictably constrained by truthfulness, justice and love, wouldn't, according to Brierley, classify as "free choices"!

However, there are, nevertheless, a range of choices where the outcomes are not so predictable. For example, given my human nature it is quite within my powers to either be truthful or to lie when my pride, social image and that kind of thing are at stake. Here we have something that is far less predictable and yet the outcome is as much a choice of mine as my choice to not to kill my grandchildren.  There is of course a host of moral decisions where human nature finds itself in a zero sum game and caught between choices which favour self over others.  This is the human predicament of societal living. 

***

I suspect that the so called problem of "freewill and determinism" is a problem manufactured  by  the snooker ball cause & effect model and cack-handed attempts to circumvent this with ghost in the machine dualism. In dualism we have a pathological paradigm that has prised apart mind and matter into two distinct categories. Brierley depicts the world of atheist materialism as a world of strict cause & effect, of billiard balls bumping into other billiard balls and where these interactions are to be regarded as the primary reality and every thing else as a secondary illusion (Although to be fair this model is probably a straw man as far as the more sophisticated atheists are concerned).

Not unnaturally Brierley is repelled by his snooker ball model. And so he should be on several counts. Firstly, as I have repeatedly said, it isn't even an accurate depiction of the physical regime as we understand it today, a regime that has random aspects and chaotic balances. Superimposed on top of this is the first person perspective of conscious cognition; any attempt to reduce this to mere billiard ball interactions would in any case trace back via the third person perspective to a conscious observing, thinking, theorising first person. The very meaning of materialism is grounded in conscious cognition and conscious cognition's rational and theoretical apprehensions. 

This theoretical apprehension has less the character of a cause & effect snooker ball model  than it does a world of mathematical patterning, a world where even random patterns have a role to play.  In the snooker ball model one may be tempted to pass on the responsibility by claiming "A snooker ball bumped my elbow and that's why I did it!" or "A tiny snooker bumped my neurons and that's why I did it!". But in a world of mathematical patterning this is not quite so easy to pass off!. 

The billiard ball cause & effect model has multiple issues: How can a billiard ball entity host conscious cognition without being haunted by a "ghost in the machine"? For Christians (unless they have escaped into ghost in the machine dualism) billiard ball mechanics also creates a problem with death: For if death entails that the unique set of identifiable billiard balls making up a person are scattered how can there be any life after death?  (Hence, the dualist's solution of patching in a "ghost"). But as we know from quantum theory there is no such thing as identifiable and unique billiard ball particles; the exchange of particles in a quantum configuration entails no new configuration; one can't meaningfully exchange quantum particles any more than one can meaningfully exchange the bits in a binary sequence; quantum particles have identity by virtue of their configuration; that is, their identity is relational. What this means is that personality cannot be identified with a unique set of billiard balls. Rather, a person's identity can only be bound up with an identifiable configuration. If identity is found in configuration then we have something that can be passed on from one medium to another and yet retain its configurational identity.

ADDENDUM 25/3/19: 

All our decisions, whether labelled as "determined" by determinists or "free-will" by "free-willists", eventually take their place in the fixed and "determined" resin block of history. In one sense we can look back on our decisions with a kind "God's eye view" on them with the potential of knowing those decisions and their results in full. The question then is this; does this perfect hindsight render what at the time were thought of as "free-will" decisions as no longer a case of "free-will" but somehow determined?  Or if we go back in time before the decisions were made does the fact that those decisions are, from a divine omniscient perspective, seen in a kind of hindsight, make them "determined"?  That is, does the mere existence of the omniscient render what would otherwise be "free-will" no longer "free will"?  I think that questions like this are an reductio ad absurdum for the whole "free-will vs determinism" contrived dichotomy. 

Sympathy For The Atheist

The inhabitants of the Earth: Lost in space

Barry Arrington, supremo of the de facto intelligent design web-site Uncommon Descent, has recently criticised science populariser Bill Nye for underestimating the ancient's view of the size of the cosmos. Let me quote the first part of Arrington's article (see here):

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses.

Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in around 150 AD), he would have known that the ancients understood very well that the universe is incomprehensibly vast. Here is the Summary of Ptolemy’s Cosmos from that article:

"The cosmology of the Syntaxis includes five main points, each of which is the subject of a chapter in Book I. What follows is a close paraphrase of Ptolemy’s own words from Toomer’s translation.

The celestial realm is spherical, and moves as a sphere.

The Earth is a sphere.

The Earth is at the center of the cosmos.

The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.

The Earth does not move."

The “the ancients thought the universe was tiny” myth and the “the ancients thought the earth was flat” myth are both refuted by the Almagest.  The persistence of these myths is difficult to explain given that it takes about 30 seconds on Google to find the Wiki article.

But apparently Bill Nye is so busy spouting his anti-Christian propaganda, he does not have 30 seconds to spare.

At the risk of being accused of a left-wing bias......

Ideas that the Earth is a sphere first appear in historical records around 600 BC (See Greek history and possibly also the Book of Job, a book thought to be dated circa 6th century BC). It is of course possible that the concept of the Earth as a sphere goes even further back, but the historical references we possess, as far as I am aware, don't go further back. As Christianity effectively came out of the classical world, belief in a spherical Earth was widespread among Christians from the start although not fully comprehensively so. But Ptolemaic theory swept the academic board after the crusades when the Western Scholastics had rediscovered classical learning from the Arabs. 

The trouble with Arrington's use of the quotation from Ptolemy is that in natural language usage of words like "tiny", "big" and "immense" are relative to perspective and context. When I'm driving around the small country of England, my car in relation to even a small country has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point. Even if one appreciates the relative insignificance of the size of a car in comparison with England or the Earth itself that doesn't mean to say one has a full appreciation of the size of the cosmic context in which the Earth is set. And so it is with Ptolemy: In spite of his comment about the relative size of the Earth we cannot conclude that Ptolemy really had a perspective on the extensiveness of the cosmos in the sense that we understand it today.

The fact that the stars and even the planets show no appreciable parallax probably tipped off many an intelligent ancient observer that those stars were very far away relative to Earthly dimensions. But although they might have an inkling that the "fixed sphere of stars" (See Ptolemy in Arrington's quote) was very distant, naturally enough given the perspective of their times Ptolemy and the Scholastics of the middle ages believed the Earth to be stationary at the centre of things as Arrington's quote confirms. It is this latter fact which really betrays the understandably limited perspective of their time.

There is "big", there is "very big", there is"immense" and there is "incomprehensibly large". I suggest that as time and science have progressed regarding the size of the cosmos we have moved from very big (Ptolemy) through immense (pre-Hubble) to incomprehensibly large (post-Hubble). Since Hubble's discoveries we take it for granted that the size of the cosmos makes even an immense object like our galaxy look small, very small. It is difficult to believe that less than one hundred years (i.e. a long human life time) have gone by since Hubble showed us that the starry universe goes way beyond our galaxy.

In the second half of the sixteenth century Thomas Digges unequivocally advanced the idea of the stars being spread across an infinite cosmos (as opposed to the stars being fixed on a distant sphere of quintessence). Not long after Digges, came the Italian Giordano Bruno who also proposed an infinite cosmos with an infinite number of worlds. On top of these huge increases in scale the centre stage status of the Earth in the Ptolemaic and medieval  cosmologies was in the process of being lost.  At the time these were revolutionary ideas and a complete departure from a finite, symmetrical and enclosed cosmos. The loss of the Earth's center-stage status, if anything, was probably a bigger blow to Western humanity's sense of special-ness than revelations of the ever increasing dimensions of that stage. The take home lesson is that human perceptions on the cosmic context and the status of the Earth have changed considerably over time whatever Arrington is trying to tell us. 

I'm a Christian but I have sympathy with many reasonable and friendly atheists who have difficulty perceiving a Christian God in the modern world view, quite apart from the perennial questions surrounding existence of suffering and evil. Through science God has progressively revealed to humanity a challenging post-enlightenment perspective on a cosmos that has immense depths in space & time and an Earth with no significant central position in terms of its space-time context, Moreover, the folk view of evolution is that it is an informationless process needing no special conditions in order to work (But see here).  All in all the popular impression is that the Earth is an incidental and accidental side show. This apparent loss of Terrestrial centrality and gain in banality has seated itself deeply in the Western psyche. Compounding the apparent loss in the sacredness and sanctity of life is the irony that even in these days of quantum theory the obsolete idea of an underlying insentient  "billiard ball" reality, independent of perception, as the primary reality is still a concept in many people's minds including, surprisingly,  Christians like Justin Brierley who are tempted to solve their consequent philosophical problems with a quasi-gnostic dualist world view.

These understandable but not always correct perceptions and reactions must be factored in when considering the rampant unbelief in the West. Consequently, I find I can hardly blame atheists for their lack of belief, many of whom are perfectly reasonable people whatever many right-wing Christians may think. True, there are some really nasty militant atheists out there who want their ideas to rule the world and would not balk at a Marxist dictatorship in order to impose their will. But then this is all part of flawed human nature and so not surprisingly we also find many really nasty authoritarian Christians out there who are just as domineering and whose toy-town cosmology and theology only further encourages unbelief and polarisation. The return to young earthism, geocentricism,  flat earthism and crackpot conspiracy theories among right-wing Christians and new-agers is evidence that many Westernised people are neither mature enough nor ready for the modern perspective and are unwilling to rise to the challenge it presents.


 I will leave the last words to Sir Kenneth Clarke.

Note: I think that this short sequence of film was taken at Osterley house

Relevant Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

ADDENDUM 4/2/19

Note on the “Axis of Evil”

Using a combination of the cosmological principle and relativity theory it is possible to trivially proclaim that the Earth is just as much at the centre of the cosmos as any other point. This “many centres” cosmos is, of course, contains nothing like the connotations implicit in the medieval use and interpretation of the Ptolemaic universe, a universe which only tolerated one centre, one axis of symmetry, not many centres and many axes of symmetry....any more than it tolerated Bruno’s “many worlds” concept. To the medieval mind the Earth and its cosmic context was like a stage set, with the Earth at centre stage, the focus of the great cloud of witnesses of Hebrews 12:1. The medieval universe did not have a democracy of centres any more than its concept of government was democratic. The Earth was the centre of creation not a centre. Democracy, whether social or cosmological, was an unnatural idea in a feudal context. 

However, things could change and so I must mention here the so called “Axis of Evil”: Some of the latest high tolerance measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background have discovered asymmetries which give a hint that we may yet be able to conclude that the Earth occupies a special position in the cosmos  - See Wikipedia for a brief account of the “axis of evil”.  The Axis of Evil suggests that the Earth is at an exclusive axis of cosmic symmetry.  It would be nice to find that the Earth’s position and orientation is somehow special after all and that its centrality is not just a case of trivial coordinate system levelling allowing any observer to claim to be at “a centre”. Quoting Wiki:

Data from the Planck Telescope published in 2013 has since found stronger evidence for the anisotropy. "For a long time, part of the community was hoping that this would go away, but it hasn’t," says Dominik Schwarz of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

But let’s not hold our breath because these results may still prove to be an artefact of measurement:

There is no consensus on the nature of this and other observed anomalies and their statistical significance is unclear. For example, a study that includes the Planck mission results shows how masking techniques could introduce errors that when taken into account can render several anomalies, including the Axis of Evil, not statistically significant. A 2016 study compared isotropic and anisotropic cosmological models against WMAP and Planck data and found no evidence for anisotropy.

Although at this stage it is clearly unwise for theists to laud these observations as restoring the special cosmic status of the Earth in human eyes, what the furore over the “Axis of Evil” reveals is just how far in the minds of (wo)men the status of the Earth’s place in the cosmic scheme of things has fallen since the medieval period and this is at least in part down to the revelations of astrophysics and generalisations of Copernicanism. Evidence of this fall is implicit in the reception among scientist of the so-called "Axis of Evil": For whether the apparent CMB large scale asymmetries are actually there or not, the mere hint of it is clearly a big shock to many scientists and in fact an unpleasant surprise to at least some of them for whom the whole affair sticks in the gullet; it’s not called the Axis of Evil for nothing!  The "Axis of Evil" affair shows us that restoring the Earth to some kind of "preferred" frame of reference would be a huge turn around in the thinking of Western scientific cosmology. Such has the cosmic insignificance of the Earth’s position gripped many a Western mind since Copernicus!

As Kenneth Clarke says; We have long rough voyage ahead of us and we can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement.

The Incoherent Notions of Free Will and Determinism: Part II

Premier Christianity Magazine screws up for once.

In the second part of this series I will be looking in detail at an article which appeared in the November 2018 edition of Premier Christianity magazine entitled "Free To Believe".  It's about the subject of "Free Will and Predestination".  The writer of the article, Justin Brierley, takes it for granted that "Free Will" and "Predestination" are meaningful terms and therefore he goes straight in with the assumption that the question is a clear "Free Will" vs. "Predestination" choice. Having  thrust this dichotomy at us without the slightest sign of hesitation or diffidence, Brierley's subsequent arguments largely consist of hand waving and surfing the cliches which do the rounds on this subject. The fact that Brierley fails to tender intelligible definitions to neither "free will" nor "determinism" means that his content is far too incoherent to facilitate meaningful agreement or disagreement.

In the first part of this series we found that it is possible to throw some light on the meaning of "determinism" from a mathematical point of view and that this meaning revolves around the degree to which behavioural patterns are mathematically predictable. But as we saw in that part the concept of mathematical "predictability" isn't a simple a binary "yes" or "no" choice: For not only does predictability come in degrees it is also relative to human knowledge and computational resources. Even so, it is not clear that the kind of mathematical determinism which facilitates predictability has got anything to do with Brierley's dichotomy. After all, in one sense God's behaviour is very predictable: Viz: We know in advance that God's behaviour will always fall on the side of Love, Justice and Truth. Does this predictability mean that God has no "free will" and that God's responses are "predetermined"?  I think that Brierley and many others who cliche surf this subject are probably confounded by theological word games that seem meaningful to them but turn out to unintelligible when scrutinised closely. This would not be a new development in the annals of theology, a subject which all too easily degenerates into casuistry

Below I follow my usual practice of quoting the writer and interleaving my own comments:

BRIERLEY: If God's grace alone is sufficient for salvation, then we must have played no part at all. God chose us we did not choose him. In Calvin's  mind, God had predestined those who will be saved  and those who will be damned. The lynchpin for this view was contained in Romans: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined  to be conformed  to the image of his Son (8:29)

MY COMMENT: This statement is hamstrung by the fact that it is very difficult for human beings to look at things from the divine perspective.  Presumably, the absolute sovereignty of God entails a power of veto over what comes out of the platonic space of possibility to be reified in the created world. In this sense God selects every thing if only, on occasion, in a permissive sense. (Presumably there are some possibilities he selects positively) Moreover, being omniscient it would seem to follow that God would "know in advance" which possible cases he is going to permit for reification and therefore "predestines it" at least via permission.

But then what meaningful content can we give to the phrase "God knows in advance" when it may well be that "time" as we know it is as much part of creation as is space and matter - in fact it is difficult to give meaning to space, time and matter in isolation from one another; e.g try defining matter without reference to time and space! Created time may be very different to divine time. So it seems quite possible that in Romans 8:29 Paul is using connotational content rather than notational content to express the absolute sovereignty of God in a way which resonates with our limited comprehension of the divine perspective and should therefore not be taken too literally.

And while we are here, a theological point: I was always under the impression that God's freely offered grace may nevertheless be rejected or accepted on the human side and consequently entails human action if only of a very minimal kind, a kind akin to saying "thank you" to someone offering a gift and then gratefully receiving that gift. Therefore I can make no sense of Brierley's claim that:  If God's grace alone is sufficient for salvation, then we must have played no part at all.   Of course, if we have accepted the gift of grace then, like everything else, our choice will be subject to the absolute sovereignty of divine permission. But that apart I would question whether we as human beings are able to talk about the divine perspective with sufficient clarity for us to be able to construct an unequivocally clear dichotomy referred to as  "free will vs predestination".

Brierley goes on to characterise the Calvinistic school of thought as follows:

BRIERLEY: This perspective amounts to a 'deterministic' view of reality. The world is the way it is and could be none other, because God has predetermined every atom and every thought of every heart. In such a universe, human freewill is an illusion. We are all playing our designated parts in a script that was written before the world began. ...[This] looks like the work of puppet master. 

MY COMMENT:  As I have already commented, given the human perspective Calvinistic determinism is probably little more than a fuzzy connotational allusion to the sovereignty of the divine perspective. I myself would personally take the view that the sovereignty of God does entail an ultimate power of veto which means that all that emerges from platonic space into created reality is therefore at least at God's permission.  Whatever we do and think has its "pre-existence" in platonic space. God's role as absolute sovereign may give him a veto over what possibilities emerge from platonic space for reification in the created order, but these possibilities lurked in platonic space before their reification, God or no God. So in one sense we are all playing out our designated parts in a "script" that once existed in platonic space, whether or not God even exists! That "script", along with many others, has always been there hidden as a contingency in configuration space. The history of the created cosmos is a bit like the contents of a giant book: If the cosmos is finite then it entails a finite number of possibilities, albeit very large. God is, as it were, a kind of author reifying one of the many permutations that the contents of the cosmic book can take. It remains a mystery why God has brought about the reification of our particular cosmic story: I don't think this particular mystery will be solved any time soon!

So, with or without those annoying Calvinists, there seems to be a mathematical sense in which "predetermination", so called, is difficult to avoid! But Brierley goes over the top; he's quite sure he can draw the conclusion that any hint of determinism implies we are puppets on strings; in spite of the fact that Brierley is working at the limits of intelligibility he confidently proffers such a conclusion. But what has emerged from platonic space is hardly comparable to a puppet. For a start no one really knows what it feels like to be a puppet, if indeed puppets have any feelings! In contrast the world which has emerged from platonic space is not a world of puppets but a world of conscious beings with very complex patterns of behaviour driven from within. If these beings are following any script at all it is the script of complex adaptive systems whose decisions are a function of an internal complexity as it reacts to its environment. The puppet metaphor is wholly inappropriate to this kind of system. Puppets are neither conscious nor capable of an adaptive response.

BRIERLEY: Atheist determinism springs from a materialist world view. All that exists is the 'material' stuff of the universe. Everything about us and the world we live in can ultimately be explained by the physics of atoms, electrons, quarks and neutrons, interacting according according to the predictable regularity of natural laws.

Think of it like this: The skill of the snooker player is in predicting as accurately as possible how the balls will ricochet off each other in order to find the pockets on the table. But theoretically, if a snooker player lined up their very first shot with perfect precision and perfect force, they could clear the table in one shot. The universe is like that, but on a much bigger scale.

MY COMMENT: I am surprised that Brierley is working to such a passe concept of physics; he fails to take cognizance of the roles of chaos and quantum randomness in today's "mechanical" paradigm. Thus Brierley's characterization of "atheist determinism" using "billiard ball" mechanics looks like a straw-man. Although there may well be many naive atheists out there who share Brierley's characterization it is not at all clear that sophisticated atheists would swallow this view and this has implications for Brieley's freewill vs determinism dichotomy. For a start, as we have seen in the first part of this series "determinism" in the mathematical sense is a graded and relative phenomenon and even when determinism is present in its strongest form such as we see in a computer system, it is still colloquially meaningful to talk about such a system "making choices" within its behavioural envelope. For sophisticated atheists like the philosopher John Searle and physicist Roger Penrose, both of whom undoubtedly understand the way the world works better than Brierley, it would be very unfair to foist this naive account of reality upon them. Moreover, Searle and Penrose are very clear in their identification of the conscious component of human cognition: As Searle may well tell us, "human machines" are a composite of a first person perspective and a third person perspective. This leads to the question as to what is the true nature of reality. In the quote above Brierley has, in all likelihood, defaulted to the dualist paradigm that contrasts the world of hard "billiard ball matter" against the ethereal and ghostly mind. It is a small step from this dualist outlook to the belief that "billiard ball matter" is the primary reality and that the conscious sentience of mind is at best secondary and at worst an illusion to be disposed of. My own view (developed elsewhere) is that conscious qualia are needed to turn the formalities of mathematical configurations into real and meaningful qualities.

It may well be that the world of quantum envelopes has a complete registration with the world of conscious thinking in as much as those envelopes contain a full complement of information about conscious activity. In this descriptive sense the behaviour of quantum envelopes would then provide a complete "explanation" of consciousness - Christians should not necessarily be in the business of denying this possibility. But even if this is actually the case and if the quantum world is humanly predictable (which in fact it appears not to be!), quantum mechanics nevertheless remains a third person theoretical account which ultimately traces back to a first person making observations and constructing a rational theory, a theory which joins the dots of conscious experience into a rational whole. The upshot is that it is impossible to eliminate the sentient mind from the world of theoretical mechanics as it is organically joined to it via perception. All this is a far cry from Brierley's billiard ball mechanics.

BRIERLEY: Every single physical event, from the movement of electrons to the orbits of planets., follows predictable laws of cause and effect. Therefore, the way the universe is now is  a direct  result of the way it was when it first began.  If you rewind the clock by 13 billion years to the exact same physical state of affairs things would roll out in exactly the same way they already have.

But in such a universe, the idea that we have any measure of free will evaporates. Every aspect of our existence was predestined by a cosmos blindly following the laws of cause and effect. 

MY COMMENT: Here we go again with Brierley's naive physics of a highly predictable world! Moreover, he's very emphatic here that the predictable patterning of so called "cause and effect" (sic) is inconsistent with "freewill".  If we are to take Brierley's position to its logical conclusion it would mean that for human beings to qualify as having freewill, their patterns of behavior would have to be absolutely random! This is absurd as clearly humans often (but not always) make rational decisions in reaction to their environment and this necessarily entails a degree of predictability.  Moreover, as I have pointed out in part I human behaviour is in many cases highly predictable and it seems wrong to then draw the conclusion that this implies the absence of "freewill". As we have also seen, God's behavior is also very predictable at a high level (if not at the detailed level) and it doesn't then follow that God therefore has no "freewill"! (what ever that "freewill" is supposed to mean).

Given the physical laws as we currently understand them it is certainly not clear that rewinding the universe back to the year dot and restarting it would mean that exactly the same history would repeat. In fact as many evolutionists would affirm it is not at all clear that, given the contingent nature of evolution, a rewind and restart would ultimately lead to the human species. So much for Brierley's account of "determinism"! The irony is that the very contingent and random nature of physical processes is often used as a counter to theism! (Theism as a concept, it seems, struggles at both the extremes of high order and low order)

Following the above quote Brierley does a brief section on "compatibilism"; that is, the belief that one's actions can be both free and determined at the same time. Trouble is, because Brierley is engaged in some heavy duty hand waving rather than giving us clear understandings of "predestination" and "freewill" it is impossible to come to any firm conclusion about their logical relationship and whether one category necessarily excludes the other. We therefore have no idea what is being claimed to be compatible with what, or vice versa what is incompatible with what.

The rest of Brierley's article suffers from the same woolly thinking. All we have to go on is some indication that Brierley closely identifies determinism with predictable patterns, but as we have seen predictability is both graded and relative, so how predictable has something got to be before it classifies as determinism? Brierley's line of thinking appears to lead to the absurd conclusion that only absolutely random behavior can be considered "free". As the matter stands, then, it is impossible to come to any intelligible conclusions as to whether freewill and determinism are mutually incompatible.

BRIERLEY: Our freewill is not truly free if determinism is still the bottom line

MY COMMENT: This statement is too incoherent to agree or disagree with.

BRIERLEY: Love is only truly love when it is freely given and freely received.

MY COMMENT: If we are to take on board the implicit logic behind Brierley's close identification of predictability with determinism we might conclude that because behavior must be random and unpredictable to be classified as "free" then a person who loves me today, may not love me tomorrow because the patterns of behaviour of  "free agents" are unpredictable. I'm sure Brierley wouldn't agree with this nonsense! At least I hope not!

BRIERLEY: We are all familiar. with the fairy tale of the enchantress who puts the prince under a spell  to make him 'love' her. But we know its not really love - its a delusion. Being manipulated in such a way is the opposite of love. By the same token, if God has pre-contrived  our every desire. so that we have no option but to love our wife, love our children and to love him, then we are acting as little more than robots.

MY COMMENT: The "spell" here reminds me of the scenario I referred to in part I where a computer executing software is infected with a virus; it's no longer the software making the decisions but the virus that has been introduced.  God could no doubt completely and miraculously disrupt our neural make up in order to make us love him, but since our identity is very much bound up with the uniqueness of our character traits, memories and history the identity of "us" would no longer be "us".  Our "I" would effectively have been hi-jacked by a different "I". God, I suspect. is looking for our personal status quo to eventually turn to him and love him. It is revealing that some Christians actually see Christian conversion as a kind personality transplant which almost wipes out the previous personality; This conversion paradigm is, I believe, pathological theology and based on a literal reading of connotational texts.

As I have already said, in one sense God hasn't pre-contrived our desires; they were already contrived in platonic space. However, it is God who chooses and permits what emerges from platonic space into our reified world of contingency. Hence God is not responsible for the forms that "pre-exist" in platonic space, although he is responsible for reifying the possibilities. Obviously there remains the big mystery of why God has reified some configurations but not others, but in this life we can no more comprehensively solve that mystery than we can the many mysteries of why JRR Tolkein wrote the particular book that he did.

***

In the next part I hope to look more closely at Brierleys' subliminal dualism, a dualism probably conceived as billiard ball "cause and effect"  materialism vs. the mysterious ghost in the machine.

....TO BE CONTINUED

Consciousness vs. de facto ID's subliminal gnosticism

The organ of conscious cognition. Taken from the website

https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/neuroscience/brainimaging/

This post on the de facto "Intelligent Design" web site Uncommon Descent and written by UD supremo Barry Arrington drew my attention to this article in Scientific American. Arrington's article, which is entitled Front runner for the most inane statement of 2018, tells us that the writer of the article: 

"....might as well have said, “I have a conscious thought that there is no conscious thought""

At first I thought I was going to agree with Arrington and that once again we had here another client who was going into denial about the existence of conscious cognition (See here for example*). But after reading the Scientific American article (which takes the form of an interview with philosopher Peter Carruthers) I came to the conclusion that not only did I agree with Carruthers but also that Arrington simply couldn't have read article and had dismissed it out of hand. In spite of the misleading title of the article (that is, "There is no such thing as conscious thought") it is nevertheless clear from reading it that Carruthers is not denying the existence of consciousness. Look at this for example (my emphases):

In ordinary life we are quite content to say things like “Oh, I just had a thought” or “I was thinking to myself.” By this we usually mean instances of inner speech or visual imagery, which are at the center of our stream of consciousness—the train of words and visual contents represented in our minds. I think that these trains are indeed conscious. In neurophilosophy, however, we refer to “thought” in a much more specific sense. In this view, thoughts include only nonsensory mental attitudes, such as judgments, decisions, intentions and goals.These are amodal, abstract events, meaning that they are not sensory experiences and are not tied to sensory experiences. Such thoughts never figure in working memory. They never become conscious. And we only ever know of them by interpreting what does become conscious, such as visual imagery and the words we hear ourselves say in our heads.

The parts of the above quote I have emphasized I interpret to imply that Carruthers is not denying the existence of consciousness, (that really would be inane!) but accepts it as a facet of mind, albeit only a facet.  I'm not going to comment here on the rightness or wrongness of the model of the mind Carruthers is working to, but instead simply agree with the general thrust of Carrunthers argument. Viz: That consciousness is, as it were, just the shore line ports of a huge continental hinterland of supporting cognitive content and activity (which is what Carruthers means by "thought"). Consciousness is just the visible tip of an iceberg of unconscious thought. Actually at one level this thesis is fairly intuitively obvious: Most of us will accept that all those neurons and constituent molecules are working furiously to give us the first person experience of mind and yet the theoretical processes that control neurons and their molecular constituents are clearly completely unconscious as far as the first person perspective is concerned.

I personally don't see consciousness as a passive epiphenomenon but something that has a coupled relationship with the cognitive hinterland; that is, one effects the other and vice versa.  Carruthers appears to agree:

We can still have free will and be responsible for our actions. Conscious and unconscious are not separate spheres; they operate in tandem. We are not simply puppets manipulated by our unconscious thoughts, because obviously, conscious reflection does have effects on our behavior. It interacts with and is fueled by implicit processes. In the end, being free means acting in accordance with one’s own reasons—whether these are conscious or not.

This is very much in line with my own ideas. See my Thinknet project.

Carruthers proposes that we have to interpret our own minds just as we have to interpret the minds of others:

Let’s take our conversation as an example—you are surely aware of what I am saying to you at this very moment. But the interpretative work and inferences on which you base your understanding are not accessible to you. All the highly automatic, quick inferences that form the basis of your understanding of my words remain hidden. You seem to just hear the meaning of what I say. What rises to the surface of your mind are the results of these mental processes. That is what I mean: The inferences themselves, the actual workings of our mind, remain unconscious. All that we are aware of are their products. And my access to your mind, when I listen to you speak, is not different in any fundamental way from my access to my own mind when I am aware of my own inner speech. The same sorts of interpretive processes still have to take place.

I would rather say that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy.

This first paragraph here, again concurs with my own thinking on the subject of language interpretation; namely that "words" do not contain meaning but rather our unconscious minds deliver conscious meaning to the string of input symbols we call natural language. It is notable that this is one area where Christian fundamentalists are inclined to err (See here).

Finally Carruthers is completely frank on the big question of what physical conditions (i,.e. the third  person scientific perspective) correlate with the stream of consciousness:

Interviewer: Brain researchers put a lot of effort into figuring out the neural correlates of consciousness, the NCC. Will this endeavor ever be successful?

Carruthers: I think we already know a lot about how and where working memory is represented in the brain. Our philosophical concepts of what consciousness actually is are much more informed by empirical work than they were even a few decades ago. Whether we can ever close the gap between subjective experiences and neurophysiological processes that produce them is still a matter of dispute.

***

So, I generally concur with Carruthers thoughts on this matter,. However, I doubt if Carrutthers would agree with my "cognitive positivism"; namely, that without a stream of consciousness, a stream which gives meaning to observation and thinking, the very idea of reality becomes hazy and murky. Without the conscious observer who experiences and pieces together a rational world it is difficult to give  any compelling conceptual substance to a world absent of conscious observers. In this particular connection I say this only as a matter of course; it is an idea I have developed and continue to develop elsewhere.

Where I have common ground with Carruthers and major differences with Arrington is on the subject of dualism. Carruthers, who is likely to be an atheist, will probably believe in a God-free material monism. And yet he should rightly throw up his hands at some of matter's mysteries; after all, how is it that matter:

a) Has the potential to generate a stream of conscious thinking.
b) Presents us with the information mystery of evolution.
c) Inevitably leaves us with the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Carruthers may think anyone like myself as a nincompoop for bringing God into it. But, nevertheless I have this in common with him; namely, a belief that so called "matter", in its potentiality, remains a remarkable mystery that is wonderful and broad. For me who sees matter as God's creation that's no surprise. But dualist Western Christian culture, of which Arrington is an example, habitually works with a natural forces verses intelligent agency dichotomy which prompts this culture to play down the God-given properties of matter. To the de facto ID community matter is "material" but mind is "immaterial".  Therefore they are unable to take on board the idea that God is immanent in matter and that it is a channel of divine agency. The (subliminal) dualism of the Christian right-wing has a tendency to see mind and matter as incommensurable aspects of the world, perhaps even irreconcilable**. Western dualist Christianity, in its diffidence toward the material world, has an air of crypto-gnosticism about it; it has subliminally swallowed a gnostic-like spiritual warfare thesis, a thesis that views the material universe as somehow profane and fundamentally at odds with all that is sacred and spiritual.

Matter is curious stuff and transcends the categories of the right-wing Christian's mindset as (s)he fights a futile battle with an imaginary demiurge whose lie about being given all the kingdoms of the world has been promoted by a quasi-gnostic Christian culture (Luke 4:1-13).

Footnotes
* Looking back at the post I've linked to here, it looks as though I placed rather too much trust in what Arrington was claiming.

** The synchrony of gnosticism & dualism with the Christian right-wing seems to be connected with their cultural marginalisation and paranoid sense of embattlement against a hostile persecuting outside culture over which they feel they have little power to influence. Gnosto-dualism as a myth makes a lot of sense to people who feel they have their back to the corner.