Philosophy Now Forum

Paul Austin Murphy repudiates a blasé reduction of mind to matter by one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/130/Francis_Cricks_Deliberately_Provocative_Reductionism

I didn't read Francis Crick's work so can't defend his own arguments against religious interpretation. We all know him for his (and his team's) discovery of DNA. Any extended works and opinion regarding religion are extraneous and properly considered, "philosophy", ...especially by the standards of what Crick likely held about what 'science' is prior to a postmodernist interpretation about philosophy versus science meant. That is, I don't think he would have misinterpreted his own thoughts as non-philosophical on the issue.

The title of the article references "deliberate", "provocative", and "reductionist", which warns me that the author is likely religious and about to nitpick irrelevant analogies that Crick may present using his background on biochemistry/biophysics as to how it relates to consciousness and religious thinking. Knowing how neurology operates does lead light on how the mind itself can induce consciousness RATHER than the assumption that mind is somehow divorced from the brain that the religious personality prefers to think is otherworldly.

Dependency Is Not Identity

Let’s put the position as formulated in the second quote in this very simple way. If it weren’t for our ‘nerve cells’ as
Francis Crick puts it, then it’s indeed the case that we wouldn’t have “memories, ambitions, personal identity, free will,
sorrows.” All these things do depend on the brain. But does it follow from this that joys, sorrows, memories, ambitions,
personal identity, free will and so on are ‘no more than’, that is, identical to, a group of neurons, a part of the brain, or
even the entire brain taken holistically? No."

Irrelevant. When I watch a news story on the television, I know that the contextual information of the story only relays information through the television as a devise and is thus not dependent upon the television itself to the source identity of the information. It is a medium that I don't question is a medium. Without the television I trust that the reality of the news can exist distinctly apart form the electronics that make up a television.

I CAN question the veracity of the information relayed through it, but, only if I have never seen anything outside of viewing the world explicitly through the device can I honestly 'depend' upon it to reference what is real beyond it. The religious interpretation begs that we default to thinking that our brain's manifestation of reality is a medium between the physical reality and some "other world" where we actually depend on WITHOUT proof. But the onus is on the religious thinker to prove THAT the reality exists without the dependency of the brain. Crick or any writer on science arguing against the philosophical aspects of mind (or soul) is intended to assert that we are forced to rely on the very medium exclusively or default only to the mechanism of our biology to be a medium between similar realities.