Developing an Approach to Non-Physical Cognitive Causation in a Creation Perspective
by Jonathan Bartlett, The Blyth Institute
Phone: (918) 307-8364 Fax: (918) 592-0997 Address: 4208 W San Antonio, Broken Arrow, OK 74012 Email: jonathan.bartlett@blythinstitute.org
The creation biology view of the human is not restricted to the categories present in physicalist worldviews, yet little has been done to expand on the what creation biology means for anthropology.  The causative categories in the physicalist paradigm are limited to chance and law (Murphy 1999).  Creation biology, on the other hand, is not so limited (Herrmann 2006).
Other causative categories appear to be present within the world, at the very least within humans, including perception, creative problem-solving, and choice.  Deuteronomy 30:19, Joshua 24:15, and Genesis 4:6-7 all record places where God calls his people to choose, and Exodus 35:30-36:2 indicate that at least certain types of creativity go beyond the physical.  This treatment will focus on developing a rational framework for investigating creative problem-solving without reducing it to physicalist causal categories.  These causative categories should not be viewed as being necessarily restricted to only humans, though the methods described here would prevent their investigation on animals.
Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computational theory, suggested an approach for formally dealing with non-physically-computable operations.  Turing introduced the concept of an oracle.  An oracle is a theoretical construct which computes the result of a computation that is known to be uncomputable by algorithmic means, and therefore unimplementable physically (Turing 1965). 
For instance, the halting problem in computer science states that every program with fixed inputs will either halt or it won’t.  However, there is no computable way to determine whether or not a program will halt.  So, a halting problem oracle is a theoretical operator which would tell whether or not a given program can halt.  Such an operator cannot be implemented physically, but its powers are roughly describable, and can be used to reason about computations which cannot be performed.  Turing, for instance, used oracles to show that there are problems that are harder than the halting problem.  Robertson (1999) showed that similar problems, despite being unsolvable physically, are solvable by humans, though he failed to develop this concept further.
Therefore, a constructive approach to human cognition for creation biology would be to use the oracle concept to model human problem-solving.  It would evaluate a variety of oracle concepts, and then measure their applicability to humans, including how universal the ability to solve them is, and what contributions training and intuition play in them.  These could then be used to generate a broader model of cognitive causation in creation biology than is available in physicalist systems.
Each oracle concept would be measured by coming up with problem sets related to the oracle, and measuring how long it takes people to solve the problem with training and without training.  In addition, to judge intuitional responses, a person would be given only two seconds to make a judgment on a problem after they have comprehended it.
Oracles which have high intuitional responses for everyone should be considered basic parts of human cognition.  Those that have high intuitional responses for some and not for others should be further examined to see what the differences are between the two groups.  Oracles which have low intuitional responses, but high responses non-intuitionally should be further investigated to see what the thinking process was to generate the solution, in order to detect what underlying oracles may potentially exist there.
Some potential oracle concepts might include the original Turing halting-problem oracle, a “framing” oracle which restricts attention to relevant information, or a “tool” oracle which selects appropriate mental tools for a task.
 
Bibliography
	•	Herrmann, R. A.  2006.  The Rationality of Hypothesized Immaterial Mental Processes. Creation Research Society Quarterly 43(2):127-129.
	•	Murphy, N.  1999.  Physicalism without Reductionism: Towards a Scientifically, Philosophically, and Theologically Sound Portrait of Human Nature.  Zygon 34(4):551-570.
	•	Robertson, D. S.  1999.  Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will, and the Turing Test.  Complexity 4(3):25-34.
	•	Turing, A. M.  1965.  Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.  Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society S2-45(1):161-228.