Immaterial Mind

Kenneth Miller's Epic Failure of Evolutionary Guesswork

Whether young or old, every morning we awaken to the sense of "I am here." That state is called consciousness. Scientists and others who hold to a materialistic worldview commonly think of consciousness as a mere function of the physical brain.

Thomas Nagel trenchantly challenged the materialist view of the conscious mind in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel sees consciousness as "both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world" (p. 53). Any account of the biological evolution of conscious organisms "must include an explanation of the appearance of consciousness," he wrote.

Since a purely materialist explanation cannot do this, the materialist version of evolutionary theory cannot be the whole truth. Organisms such as ourselves do not just happen to be conscious; therefore no explanation even of the physical character of those organisms can be adequate which is not also an explanation of their mental character. In other words, materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants. (p. 45.)

The idea that a conscious human mind could have arisen purely by neo-Darwinian evolutionary processes strains the imagination and defies explanation. Yet one scientist thought he could explain it.

Miller's Attempt

Renowned evolutionist Kenneth R. Miller responded to Nagel's book and claimed to answer its challenge in The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will (2018). In this book, Miller asserts:

• The fossil record is quite complete; we know that rapid skull-size increases evolved in humans over a short geological period.
• With the rapid human skull-size increases there correspondingly came rapid brain-size increases.
• The brain is composed of neurons and other biological structures built from chemical molecules.
• The larger the brain, the more neurons it contains, and the more intelligent is the (human) primate it resides in.
• Consciousness is the subjective sense of being aware of thoughts and of acting with purpose.
• The brain is where intelligence and consciousness reside.
• The chemical molecules that the neurons consist of do not themselves have consciousness.
• Neurons (and related structures) convey electrical impulses and direct the flow of such impulses.
• The brain is composed of networks of interconnecting neurons and related structures, with billions of cells and billions of interconnections.
• When huge numbers of neurons interconnect and transmit electrical impulses among themselves in the brain, there arise functions of operation of the whole brain that would not arise with fewer neurons and fewer connections.

Simply stated, Miller contends that when enough neurons are interconnected, even without a plan, the result is a conscious mind. He writes:

No atom, by itself, is ever alive. But when atoms interact with innumerable others inside a living cell, those actions generate the remarkable process we call life. The same . . . is true at an even higher level for the far more remarkable process of consciousness. (p. 167)

He concludes: "Consciousness, therefore, is something that matter does, not something that matter is" (p. 168). Is Miller's view plausible?

Mind as Matter?

The Human Instinct makes many claims about what neo-Darwinian evolution and scientific orthodoxy have allegedly proven regarding the origins and development of life on Earth. The book doesn't try to support those claims; nor does it take account of the monumental rebuttals found in books like Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (2009) and Darwin's Doubt (2013). Meyer's work not only undermines the plausibility of undirected evolution resulting in the emergence of physical life-forms, but it also shows that: (1) atoms don't randomly form information; and (2) information is the fundamental source of DNA and all biological systems.

While The Human Instinct does not deal with the evolution of physical life-forms, it does essay to prove that human consciousness evolved without a pre-existing plan, program, or direction. Miller contends that consciousness is a by-product of purely physical processes governed by the laws of physics and chemistry.

According to Miller, all mental functions stem from the operation of the physical brain, what we might call biological "hardware." Miller seems inclined to agree that the brain is comparable to a computer insofar as it receives and processes inputs (sight, sound, etc.), extracts information from those inputs, and makes calculations concerning those inputs. He asserts that both perception and consciousness are based on the workings of the brain's cellular components and are thus "explicable in purely scientific terms" (pp. 170–171).

While Miller mentions perception, he doesn't point out that sensory perception is extremely complex. Consider just the senses of smell and taste. Although they are taken for granted by everyone, Gordon M. Shepherd shows in Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters (2015) that these senses involve finely tuned and continuously restored chemical receptor systems, electrically coded signals, and three-dimensional wave forms that are produced and decoded in real time. Just smelling and tasting your morning coffee, for example, can involve the sensing capacity of up to 600 different molecules. While scientists may observe where in the brain the electrical activities associated with these processes occur, they cannot explain how the physical operations become our personal subjective experiences of taste and smell.

Neural impulses associated with sight, hearing, and touch likewise can be detected and traced in the brain, but how the brain actually converts these electrical pulses into thoughts, memories, and understanding is entirely inexplicable in purely physical terms.

When Do Neurons Start Thinking?

Consciousness presents an even more difficult problem than receiving and processing sensory data. If, as Miller believes, consciousness arises merely from the interactions between elements of biological hardware, he ought to be able to show how that happens. But he simply posits that consciousness arises when enough neurons and other cells form a mass of electrical pulses and waveforms in a biological mass called a brain.

Put two neurons next to each other—no processing and no consciousness occurs. Gather two thousand or two million neurons together—there is no difference. Physicist Andrew Thomas, in Hidden in Plain Sight No. 9: The Physics of Consciousness (2018), explains that neurons operate like transistors connected with wires. Transistors allow for the switching, amplification, and modulation of electrical current. That's just electricity. Amass a lot of transistors emitting a lot of electrical waves and pulses, without a plan or structure, and all you get is noise. Even if your collection of electrical wires carries a variety of frequencies and voltages, you don't get a changed result—you just get multi-dimensional, multi-phasic noise.

Yet Miller argues that if you add together enough noise, you somehow get information you can use. More astoundingly, he thinks that if you amass and interconnect enough noise-generating neurons, that conglomeration of noise-producing cells will somehow become aware of itself and start observing, thinking, planning, and directing other biological systems to act.

Again, that leap from a mass of purposelessly interconnected noisy neurons to consciousness requires a plausible explanation of how that leap is made. We have amazingly powerful computer hardware components that can be interconnected, just as neurons are. There is no need to physically build a monster computer to test Miller's conjecture. We can simply think about the design that precedes and underlies any large computer development project. At what point would randomly interconnected hardware components, even trillions of them, result in the existence of even a "simple" operating system, like that which powered the 1978 TRS-80 hobby computer, for example, or the 1980s MS-DOS?

This question is not rhetorical. It is not an argument from ignorance but a question that must be asked and answered by Miller and others who claim that undesigned physical matter and undirected processes can result in consciousness or any other human mental function. In his 1997 book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, the esteemed Harvard neurobiologist, concedes that sentience, the most distinctive element of consciousness, remains an "enigma," a "mystery" for which "we have no scientific explanation."

The claim that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" can be true in some instances, but if Miller is to validate this claim regarding consciousness, he must show how the greater function of the whole (the brain) is produced by the interactions of the parts (the neurons, etc.). Miller doesn't make that showing. He simply contends that a random assemblage of trillions of parts randomly interconnected in a trillion ways becomes something different and monumentally greater than a random assemblage of trillions of interconnected parts. He offers no explanation for why mere hardware, when aggregated to an immense degree, obtains a new function and becomes a conscious thinking machine.

Modern "electronic brains" (i.e., computers) do contain the millions of components and connections that Miller imagines. And these "brains" do respond to commands and perform calculations—but only because they have been instructed to do so and in what way to do it. The instructions are called programming, and it takes intelligent agents to conceive of, plan, and write the programs, which we call software.

Software operating systems coordinate the assembly of the components and guide the flow of information, and they host still more software programs to achieve what their programmers imagined. Software, the encoded collection of data and instruction sets, cannot evolve from hardware, and it cannot be accidentally mutated to create totally new functions. (Test this yourself with the simulation at www.informutation.com.)

The Fatal Focus on Hardware

Miller, who seems stuck in a 19th-century vision of biological life as physical matter only, never concerns himself with how the intelligent programming needed to operate the biological hardware originated.

For example, he asserts: "The three tiny bones (popularly known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup) in our middle ears derive from jaw structures of reptilian ancestors" (p. 115). He offers no proof of the physical evolution of this development; no step-by-step mutational tale of how the reptilian jaw became the human ear is supplied. More to the point, Miller doesn't describe how the embedded instructions designed to tell a jaw system how to do the work of chewing could be accidentally and coincidentally modified to tell the bones to switch over to the work of hearing, which involves:(1) receiving sound vibrations at multiple frequencies and in varying patterns, (2) decoding them as discrete sounds, and, crucially, (3) mentally recognizing them as meaningful in the environment. Somehow, over time, jawbones just stopped chewing and started listening on their own?

The problem of evolutionary processes being able to generate software to direct sound detection and recognition is crucial—and hearing is only one of thousands of human body systems needing such software. Oblivious to this problem, Miller writes: "the nervous system, including the brain, can first be understood as a network of closely linked cells that pass chemical and electrical messages between them" (p. 123).

"Messages"? A message is a symbolic representation of information from a sender who wants something to happen, who expects a receiver to exist, to receive the information, and to act upon it (or to advance to a higher level of knowledge). Every message exists in a context of planned action over a period of time. But planned action isn't neo-Darwinian; it requires intelligent thought and volition. Undirected, undesigned processes do not plan or purposefully act to obtain a future result—they do not send "messages."

Books as disparate as Perry Marshall's Evolution 2.0 (2015) and Werner Gitt's Without Excuse (2011) make it clear that no undirected physical mechanism is known or even conceivable that could create a code, let alone the necessary encoding and decoding devices. Yet these components are needed to send and receive any message. Code systems are fundamental to any software system as well. They are integral to DNA and cell biology.

Worse Than Wrong

Thus, far from explaining how human consciousness evolved by neo-Darwinian means, The Human Instinct actually highlights the problems that undercut the naturalistic explanation of mind. Indeed, Miller's proposition falls victim to Michael Graziano's critique in "Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong," where Graziano writes:

You see this trope in science fiction: If you bundle enough information into a computer, creating a big enough connected mass of data, it'll wake up and start to act conscious, like Skynet. This appeal to our latent biases has given the integrated information theory tremendous currency. It's compelling to many respected figures in the field of neuroscience, and is one of the most popular current theories. (The Atlantic, March 9, 2016)

Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, observes that the monster neuron data bundle theory "doesn't actually explain anything. What exactly is the mechanism that leads from integrated information in the brain to a person who ups and claims, 'Hey, I have a conscious experience of all that integrated information!' There isn't one."

Nagel was right: "Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science" (Mind and Cosmos, p. 35). Consciousness, if it has any material form, cannot be hardware alone but must also involve software. Yet software can neither originate from nor be functionally modified by neo-Darwinian means. It is always designed.

Miller's attempt to explain "how we evolved to have reason, consciousness, and free will" totally fails to show that the human mind evolved to its present state of amazing.