Did Consciousness Evolve?

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Life Sciences, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Astronomy

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2024

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

On this ID The Future episode from the vault, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviews Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher with a background in computer engineering, about consciousness, evolution, and intelligent design. Did consciousness evolve? What does the evidence suggest? And how do materialists deal with the seemingly immaterial reality that is consciousness? Enjoy this guest episode from Mind Matters, a podcast of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Listen to more episodes at www.mindmatters.ai and idthefuture.com.

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.3	On today's episode of ID the Future, we are happy to bring you a guest episode from
0:19.5	our sister podcast here at Discovery Institute, Mind Matters. In this Mr.
0:23.0	Poist here at Discovery Institute, Mind Matters.
0:25.0	In this one, neurosurgeon Michael Eignor
0:27.0	interviews philosopher and computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup.
0:31.0	You can find Mind Matters on the web or on your podcast app of choice. Check it out.
0:38.3	This is Dr. Michael Eigner on Mind Matters News. I have the privilege today of interviewing Dr. Bernada Castrup. Dr. Castrup has
0:48.1	been leading a modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, which is the idea that reality is essentially mental rather than physical as the materialist perspective that has dominated science over the past several centuries has held.
1:06.2	Dr. Kastrup has a PhD in philosophy as well as a PhD in computer science.
1:11.6	Dr. Kastrup, welcome to Mind Matters News.
1:14.3	Thanks for having me, Mike.
1:15.4	It is a privilege.
1:18.5	And so can consciousness have evolved by a Darwinian mechanism?
1:25.0	I think by definition it cannot, by the way we define matter,
1:30.0	it could not have evolved because it performs no function.
1:35.0	Our physicalist account of reality entails that it is the measurable quantitative properties of matter that are causally efficacious.
1:45.9	In other words, its mass, spin, charge, momentum that leads to effects, that leads to the dynamisms of nature to the chains of cause and effect.
1:56.0	And the consciousness, that qualitative state that seems to accompany the quantitative dynamics of physicality,
2:07.0	by definition cannot have causal efficacy.
2:12.0	That's the definition of consciousness and matter under a physicalist
2:17.9	metaphysics. So if it cannot produce an effect, if it's something that simply accompanies the material
	...

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