Hate Mail File -- You Can't Debunk Minds Without Also Debunking The Mind You're Using To Debunk MInds

One of the most seriously discrediting things about materialism is that materialists have to depend on them and their ideology having an exemption from the very materialism they are asserting.   That was the issue I had with Richard Seymour when he made an absurdly tortured argument for the material nature of ideologies, one which he got rather heated about when I raised it.

Materialism, like Biblical fundamentalism, is a monist system, a system in which it is declared that nothing exists which is not included in and accounted for by their ideological frame.   Materialists assert that there is nothing but the material universe, complete with the forces and physical laws that govern the movements of objects.   In some more sophisticated assertions of it, "naturalism" "physicalism", the definition of what that comprises is more up to date with current physics but the monist nature of it and its insistence on the same things make those really no different.

Everything in a materialist universe is governed by the same physical causation that they use to analyze the origins and behaviors of physical objects, nothing exists outside of that web of causation, anything proposed which could escape it is declared, by force of their original assertions, non-existent.  And, like all ideologies, those are a program of faith to be believed in, to be convinced of, held on to through, at bottom, an emotional choice to believe them.

That is why our minds are such a big problem for materialists to get rid of.  Our experience of consciousness doesn't fit into their ideological framing and most people, I would assert even the most rigid of materialists, don't really believe that is what their minds are like.  Which is a huge area of discussion but it's not the one I'll go into.

For a materialist, their real goal is almost always to get rid of God and any things that anybody can possibly believe imply the existence of God.  I have never, once, encountered an ideological atheist whose major area of focus is not trying to convince other people and, perhaps, themselves, that there is no God.   It is an emotional thing with them, beneath all of their pretenses.  That is the reason they are willing to go to such absurd lengths to make claims aimed at destroying anything that implies that God is real and that we are more than merely physical objects that, when applied to them, it impeaches the validity of their ideological framing and, as well, the minds with which they think up these ideas.  

I have been through this before, as recently as earlier this week.   If our ideas are the product of physical causation working on the chemicals and structures in our brains then any idea we have is merely the working out of that pre-existing chemistry and physics to its inevitable end.  That it produces strychnine  swallowing Pentecostalism in one mind is as inevitable and right as it producing the thinking of Stephen Hawking or Jerry Coyne or Richard Seymour.   There is no way to say that the one is wrong and the other is right, they are merely the results of the peculiar chemical precursors that led to the ideas that those produce.  AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE THAT ANY IDEA CAN TRANSCEND THAT MOST BANAL AND ENTIRELY VULGAR CHARACTER.  I say "vulgar" because that character is one that would be truly universal, it would apply to every idea anyone has about everything.   For a strict materialist, the thinking that produced a British mass murderer, committing genocide on the inhabitants of Tasmania has exactly the same character as the thinking that produced the acts of the most benevolent missionary, the reason that the Tasmanian and other genocides could be discussed so dispassionately in 19th century science, in the same books which ridiculed the missionaries' work.   I noted that last week, as well.

Ah, but, you may say, science objectively consults the physical universe, holding up scientific ideas against that*  and so achieves objective reality.   But materialism is a universal faith, you can't pick and choose which ideas get to be a foundation, not conditioned by the same physical forces.  Those acts of the mind that comprise the practices of science don't get to escape the sealed maze you've insisted on any more than the ideas you don't like.  All acts of perception, analysis, measurement, review, are as stuck in the mire of physical causality, all of them are the mere result of the peculiar chemistry and physical action which produced them.  Logic, itself, is a mere product of material causation in the materialist system, that two people arrive at the same result and another person arrives at a different one is merely the result of chance presence of chemicals and physical forces.  None of that can escape their peculiar pre-conditions to achieve objectivity.  Given that no two brains will ever be exactly alike, I think materialism provides a better argument against two scientists ever having exactly the same idea or even one person retaining an idea for more than a split second before it changes into something else than it is that something residing in a human brain called "objectivity" is real.

And all of those virtues of science, the quest for truth, would have to be fantasies as well.   Truth, truths, would also have no status above being the mere, inevitable results of the peculiar chemistry and physical conditions that produced those ideas.   "Truth" would have to transcend that to achieve the status of virtue, something which materialism has no room for.

This could go on and on, including whether or not the necessary reactions and physical adjustments of chemicals and physical structures happen fast enough to account for our real-time experience of thinking and having ideas and continually modifying those ideas, yet still being able, in all of that, for those ideas to retain a cohesive identity in our minds, but I don't have the time right now.  I've got a hell of a lot of snow to move today.

My guess is that, by now, you're feeling pretty angry at me looking at just some of the logical necessities of your own ideology, atheist materialism.   My guess is that it's an experience you share with a really rigid Biblical fundamentalist when confronted with the fact of evolution and its associated facts of geology.  That is, if you're wrong and something like a "fact" can exist independent of the brains that have those ideas.   I don't know if, perhaps, you can learn from that experience.  Maybe your brain doesn't contain the correct molecules to construct those ideas from.

* I'll point out for at least the dozenth time that Stephen Hawking has called for that rule of science to be junked and that the ideas of science be judged on their internal coherence, alone.  Something which he's not alone in doing, it has been an idea popular with scientists, all of those I'm aware of dedicated materialists and atheists, for well over a century.  Freud, abiogenesis, the "exobiology" invented by "The Cosmos is all there is" guy himself.

Update:  And, about that footnote, those very dedicated materialists who "do science" divorced from even the possibility of holding up their equations and claims against real things in the real universe are, ironically, proposing to bring science back to the late, medieval scholastic practice that Galileo confronted.  His greatest opponents weren't cardinals and even popes, many of whom had supported him, even some of the members of the Inquisition, even the nephew of The Pope, who arranged for his protection and sheltering after the sentence was passed.  I'd always been told that it was the Cardinals who refused to look through his telescope but I've recently read that it was actually the faculty members specializing in natural philosophy (what science was called back then) who were, almost all devoted to the scholastic tradition.   In one of the funniest and most telling of all things about current ignorance of the background of what they turned into the Galileo myth, many of those who championed empiricism were, in fact, members of the Catholic clergy.