Memories decay exponentially. This occurs both over time and over number of items to remember.

That is a popular model, but one I find does not match my own experience of memory at all.

Sometimes just a particular smell is able to bring back a memory from decades ago of a small and insignificant happening that I haven't recalled for many years.

Certainly there are some individuals who absolutely do not fit into your characterization, and there is a lot of reason to suspect that the rest of us also can have access to that kind of remembering.

I always say I do not, and all evidence suggests this is the case.

Actually there is an enormous amount of evidence that consciousness can sometimes temporarily be disassociated from the body, however this evidence is extremely disconcerting for committed reductionist materialists who therefore dismiss, ignore, and minimize it, and impugn those who research it, and associate it all with people like Shirley MacClain and Deepak Chopra.

I don't personally like the term "soul" as it seems to bring too many assumptions to bear. But for those who are willing to entertain questions instead of assuming they already have the right answers, there is some very interesting data out there. . .

No, you have to be the ultimate source of your decisions. If anything else in your past, such as the initial condition of your brain, fully determined your decision, then clearly you did not.

Words like "you" are far more problematic than words like "consciousness" that you eschew.

After all, even a young infant shows unmistakable signs of awareness, while the "I" self-concept doesn't arise until the middle of the toddler stage. The problem with free will is that there is no actual "you" entity to have it. The "you" is simply a conceptual place-holder built up from ideas of an individual body and its sensations.

In order for you to have free will, there has to be a "you" entity in the first place. . .

One person doesn't need to pretend that he doesn't grasp something until a certain critical mass of the "right" people catch up. Correctness isn't up for a vote, and the feeling that it is is nothing more than an artifact of social wiring.

Anyone with a bit of insight and experience with the sociology of group behavior will read OB and see some glaringly obvious "artifacts of social wiring" in the psychology behind many of the postings and comments here.

Some commenters have recently expressed disturbance at the thought of constantly splitting into billions of other people, as is the straightforward and UNAVOIDABLE prediction of quantum mechanics.

Please. Generating so many paragraphs here displaying this sort of smug assurance in your own conclusions about highly controversial topics is the exact opposite of "overcoming bias".

I have noticed Robin gently reminding you of this fact; perhaps it is time to pay some attention to him, if not your other critics. . .

As pertains to brains, we have reasonable inferences that the mind is strictly anchored in a physical substance. Among the oldest I'm aware of is Heraclitis' observation that hitting someone in the head causes stupor, confusion, etc, so the mind probably resides there.

Yes and when I hit my radio with a rock it might stop working, change the station, if I rip out transistors it might make the sound distorted, etc. That really doesn't prove that the song is stored inside the radio, does it?

If you are interested in reality instead of just fitting in with current intellectual fashion, you really need to step outside the echo chamber sometime and engage with the best arguments against your current positions, not simply flail against strawmen.

And a special point for commentor Richard above -- you have an interesting and mostly thoughtful blog and you do a good job pointing out some reasons why eliminative materialism is a problematic belief. But then you stumble badly by claiming that only the only sane non-reductionist position is that mind arises from the brain. Claiming that people with different ideas than you must be insane is a position that has often been expressed in the history of intellectual discussion, but almost never by those on the correct side of a debate. . .

Anyway, I won't debate this point here any further because this blog is not interested in examining its philosophical biases towards materialism. I only wanted to point out an interesting reference book to those readers here not already utterly convinced that their beliefs are correct and their opponents not sane -- I know there are lurkers here that fit that description. . .

Matthew C., commenting here on OB, seems very excited about an informally specified "theory" by Rupert Sheldrake which "explains" such non-explanation-demanding phenomena as protein folding and snowflake symmetry.

Actually Eliezer I'm much more excited to be in nature doing landscape photography, spending time with my family, seeing if I can make money trading stocks, and chatting about the nondual nature of reality, among other things.

I'm become totally and completely uninterested in arguing with people who refuse to acquaint themselves with the evidence for things and then rail against them ex cathedra from the dogmas of "official science". The only reason I responded to your previous post on reductionism was TGGP kindly informed me of it and your mention of my query from last year, and I thought it only fair to point your readers to some relevant material.

Best,

Matthew C.

Interesting to see all this fervent and unquestioning faith in reductionism here. No surprise.

However, reductionism is incapable of explaining the real world.

Consider protein folding. A good rough approximation model of a protein is a string with a hundred magnets tied to it.

Now throw the string up into the air.

The notion that the string would immediately fold into a precise shape every time you throw it, is the same as the notion that a protein would fold into a precise shape, very quickly, every time you make it. And yet that is what proteins do. And we have no reductionistic explanation that fits the facts.

There are billions of very close to minimum-energy configurations for each protein sequence based on the electrochemical forces between the amino acids in the chain and hydrophilic / hydrophobic considerations. And yet only one of them is chosen, often in a few microseconds. This is totally inexplicable based on a reductionistic analysis. We CANNOT predict protein conformation based on the physical and chemical properties of the amino acid chains.

All of the protein folding software uses the folding behavior of known proteins and sub-domains of known proteins (such as ι-helices and β-sheets) to attempt to guess protein structures, and even then there are many solutions to the equations (in a "successful" analysis the actual tertiary structure will match one of the possible structures that the software came up with, but not any of the others, and reductionism is at a complete loss why). Rupert Sheldrake suggests an answer based on an evolving set of holonic structures where each more complex level includes the behaviors of its constituent holons, yet also includes additional properties basically "chosen" by the universe through a repetition and reinforcement of habits.

Even with supposedly "well known" phenomena like snowflake crystallization the reductionist explanation simply fails to ring true. Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other? The "contact mechanics" explanation simply doesn't wash. Snowflake branches are very obviously probabalistic structures, so the "changing growing conditions of the snowflake" explanation simply doesn't wash, since probabalistic structures ought not show such high amounts of symmetry unless some kind of resonance is occurring between the arms and reflections of arms in the snowflake.

Unquestioning reductionism blinds people to some very simple observations about the world. . .