Previous Contributors to The Great Debate
Hugh Deasy
Hugh Deasy is
an astrophysicist.
He studied at Trinity College Dublin, Dunsink Observatory (DIAS)
and the Copernicus centre in Wasaw (CAMK).
He currently works as a flight dynamics expert at the Euro space Ops
centre (ESOC), Germany.
Since the mid 1990s, after reading Penrose's Emperor's New Mind,
he has developed an interest in the mind-matter debate.
He has participated in debates on the topic and has contributed
two essays to The Great Debate on the topic:
Hugh has also been developing a new space propulsion system in his spare time,
which delayed the publishing of his current book,
Humpty Dumpty Disaster: The Ghost or the Machine
for some years.
Now both projects are reaching completion, with the book being published
and the space drive being developed by several companies in Europe and the USA.
As a book is easier to bring out than a space drive, this is already available.
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Books by Hugh Deasy
Humpty Dumpty Disaster: The Ghost or the Machine
Though there is no official stance on the brain-mind debate,
in this era of secularised society a 'default philosophy' has
crept up almost unnoticed and is now a sort of new bible for the
media and western society as a whole. This 'default philosophy'
holds that there is nothing but matter, that the equation mind=brain
is true, that Newtonian/Calvinist pre-destination or determinism
dominates the world and that artificial intelligence (AI) will
soon produce a robot superior to humans in almost all areas.
The book challenges this unspoken consensus and shows how weak the
cases are for AI, determinism and the mind=brain idea.
Also, that other form of determinism, i.e. that we are genetically
pre-determined, is examined in the light of the paucity of meaningful
information in the human genome. It is shown that the genome information
content is much less than similarly complex artificial systems.
So some sort of epi-genetic or epi-physical agency must be at work.
The truth or falsity of the cases examined have major bearings on our
view of human nature, the dignity of the human being and our regard for
the environment and nature. In a soulless world many of the old values
and morals disappear. The future of our planet may depend on humanity
(re)gaining its self-awareness.
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