Maybe I Should Issue This As A Monthly Challenge

I am still getting angry responses about my April post pointing out how the "brain only" theory of the mind, the standard model taught in universities, promoted in the media, especially such mid-brow venues as NPR, championed by, among others, the professional pseudo-skeptics such as Susan Blackmore couldn't work without it including precognition or, perhaps telepathy or clairvoyance or other proposed psychic faculties.  The problem for those who insist that our minds and everything in them are, in reality, the physical arrangement of physical entities, molecules, neural connections, other unspecified structures or some bizarre assertion that our minds are the equivalent of computer random access memory that gets switched on some time and which doesn't get the final shut down until brain death,, or some, unspecified, something.  When your model is based in ideology instead of real evidence, it can wriggle around and out of many kinds of obstacles, but not all of them.

And I'm glad the idea is getting flack because no one has, of yet, been able to answer the point of how the brain would 1. be stimulated to make the physical structure to be those ideas in the brain without it knowing it needed to make a new idea, 2. how it could begin to make the right physical structure which would be that idea without knowing what it was to make, 3. how it would know how to make the right physical structure for an idea which wasn't already present in the brain to instruct and inform the construction of that idea, In other words, how the brain would know how to construct a new thing that it didn't know about.  4. how it would know how to make that idea integrate, immediately into the already existing pattern of ideas, to keep it from producing a confused, random experience to be the reality that we experience as a common reality.  And, a point I haven't yet raised, 5. how many brains, millions, billions of them, would know how to make the unique physical structures to be the physical existence of the same idea considering all of the above,   And, there are, no doubt, other hard problems that the "brain only" brain model would have to overcome in order to gain coherence and to work.   If the same ideas exist as different physical forms in different brains (and I don't see how they couldn't but be different, considering how individual experience those ideas are integral to is) then the ideas would have to exist apart from and not be dependent on a physical form.   The "brain only" model of the mind couldn't withstand that being the case and I don't think it can.

If they are right, there is absolutely no way for it to work without even the most pedestrian brain in existence which produced coherent ideas at all having a keen psychic faculty which operated with a far higher degree of accuracy and efficiency, making the exact, right predictions of what those ideas should be, perhaps tens of thousands of times a day, perhaps an hour, every day as our brains produced the ideas necessary for us to navigate and negotiate through the world in each and every one of us.  If such a scenario could be analyzed in terms of probability the chances of such a successful series of predictions would probably need an enormously large exponent to express it, perhaps dwarfing the improbability of the finely tuned constants being as they are.

My mind tells me that unless materialists can come up with some explanation of why this isn't true they will either have to embrace the reality of things which are anathema to them or they can't possibly maintain their materialism.   If consciousness, if minds can't be made a part of the physical universe then materialism, naturalism, physicalism all fall to pieces.  And, considering the fact that materialism is the de facto and required ideology of what is regarded as the intellectual community these days, the very foundation of today's intellectual establishment cannot but be in danger of caving in unless it gives that materialism up.  I think the foundations of it are caving in , in fact, and it accounts for why so many people who can't match their own experience of life and thought to materialist ideology reject materialists' authority.

I will publish anyone who can refute this and admit they've overcome that hurdle for their ideology, I'll even publish anyone who can tell us why this not valid in addressing or is not fatal to their ideology.  Providing their explanation coheres and can be made to conform to the common experience of thinking and operating successfully in the world.

Update:  "The Truth Is Out There!"  Materialism meets X-Files

In his comment, RMJ makes an important point about the materialists' common practice when confronted with problems of their ideology.

What's funny about this is the critiques border on 'faith-based" reasoning. Well, they don't border on it; it IS faith-based reasoning.

Science says this is how it works, so that must be how it works,even if they can't explain how it works (it all sounds like "and then a miracle occurs!"), because it HAS to work that way, because science says this is how it works!

Clear? But science is truth, so this has nothing to do with merely trusting science (which is all faith is: trust) so it has to be true even if no one can explain how it is true!

What this describes is a long standing and ubiquitous habit of materialist and atheist thinking and it is founded in the faith of scientism, that science does have a scientific explanation for all phenomena,  Those explanations are merely not known but are, we are not to doubt, out there somewhere, we just have to belive those are there and that materialism will be vindicated by them and the supernaturalists and religionists will be vanquished in the never-never land where those are.  The idea most famously and influentially and irrationally given by Bertrand Russell. "Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know," which is an extraordinary thing for a mathematician to have said as virtually all of the knowledge contained in mathematics is not liable to discovery by scientific methods.  What's even more extraordinary is how many even sophisticated scientists who, daily, use knowledge in their professional work which is not derived from scientific method and who cannot but not know it was an idea which, itself, is not vulnerable to scientific demonstration, parrot and even live by Russell's dogmatic statement.

Karl Popper called those claims  of deferred answers "promissory notes" of materialism, though you could make the same point about almost all of atheist ideology, certainly in the modern period after the advent of science. I've called the common habit of thought that materialists engage in "finding materialism in the gaps", which is like the old accusation of putting God in the gaps of knowledge, except that is something no sophisticated and sufficiently aware religious believer would do but is practically a requirement to be considered sophisticated and aware among atheists.  There are, indeed, two rules, a double standard, one which covers those who are religious and one which is claimed as the right of atheists, materialists and those who hold the old, romantic view of science as the all knowing oracle.   To which most people say, to hell with that, to the rage of the materialists.  Of course, unless those answers are known the nature of them and how they are discoverable isn't knowable.  If you take Russell's formula as a defining aspect of the truth, any truth which was not vulnerable to scientific method, however you want to define those, would be declared, by fiat, to be untrue or unknown.

And now, I've got to go to work.