Jon:
A few quotes that suggest ideas to discuss with your scientist friends and
others who look to science for all the answers:
�If one observes an amoeba in its natural habitat � one would not hesitate to
attribute to it the power of subjective experience. What the organism learns
about its environment can be expressed in the simple phrase, �It�s better
here� or �It�s not so good here.�� ---Konrad Lorenz
�Information is physical�whether it consists of magnetic spots on a disk
drive or patterns of neurons in the brain�and so it must obey the laws of
physics. Again, science seems constrained by the impossibility of
separating itself from the very world it strives to understand.� ---Rolf Landauer
�As part of the scientific approach to determining truth there is an essential
role for the evaluation of non-empirical criteria such as economy, elegance
and naturalness whose satisfaction is vital to the acceptance of a scientific
theory.� ---Kurt Godel
�In ways yet unknown, expectations about health or disease are sometimes
translated into a bodily reaction that fulfills them.� ---Nicholas Wade on the
placebo effect.
�We do not yet understand physics sufficiently well that the functioning of our
brains can be adequately described in terms of it, even in principle.� ---Roger
Penrose
�To assert that there is no reason why the laws of physics are as they are is
to claim that they exist reasonlessly, and so are absurd. Although such a
belief is common among scientists, it is founded on a glaring contradiction.
The same scientist who argues that nature is rational at each step of the
causal chain all the way down to its bedrock at the laws of physics, must
perform a backflip at this point, and argue that, when it comes the laws,
rationality fails. We are asked to accept that a rational physical universe is
founded on logical absurdity.� ---Paul Davies
�At the quantum level scientists couldn�t find any spiritual stuff, but neither
could they find any material stuff.� ---Ken Wilber
�After all, mind is such an odd predicament for matter to get into. I often
marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forged in early
chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous fever we call
consciousness. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, nerve tissue and
electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do
time-and motion-studies, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser
mayhem of the heart? What is mind, that one can be out of one�s? How can
a neuron feel compassion? What is a self? Why did automatic, hand-me-
down mammals like our ancestor somehow evolve brains with the ability to
consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future? If our
experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable
chemical stew, then what does it mean to know something, to want
something, to be?� ---Diane Ackerman
To add my own two cents:
The vast majority of people have yet to buy the view of science that a bunch
of electrons are the ultimate source of humor, beauty, mathematics,
cathedrals and Bach's Fugue in C. Likewise it stretches credulity to believe
that mind resulted from mindless shuffling of primordial slime. By
comparison, life after death appears infinitely reasonable.
Platt
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