Friday, September 18, 2015

An Open Challenge To Materialists Since April And Counting

All ideas are preceded by mind; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, pain follows him just as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.

Dharmapada, verse 1.1 

I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today.  I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.  

If that is the case, how does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make or, even, that some new idea needs to be made?   How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head?  How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea, how does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is? 

All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall.  For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.  

The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain.  But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.  

Update:  If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.   

46 comments:

  1. This is, more or less, the Platonic argument for epistemology: how can we have an idea if the idea is not already present?

    Empiricists tried to dodge the question by saying experience, through sensory input, gave us ideas. But it's a dodge, not an answer. How is it experience "gives" anything, and how is it the brain (not the mind; Hume pretty much dissolved that concept into irrelevance) uses that information to create ideas? It's either a "black box" or it's all done with mirrors; or, in the favorite metaphor of the day, it's turtles all the way down.

    Plato's idea requires a transcendent metaphysic and even an immortal soul. The empiricist model requires a "Trust me."

    Which is not to say either is necessarily satisfactory, but the question of epistemology is a deep one. And if there's one thing positivism is not, it's deep.

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    1. But the Tots are good with the shallow.

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    2. ok, words are ideas. so where/when did your immortal soul learn to speak English? and how come your vocabulary can expand throughout life if every word/idea is attached to your soul? and why do we need to learn things? you guys really need to logic better.

      an fMRI is a "black box", but and undefined, undetectable soul isn't?

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    3. "words are ideas"

      Oh, really, that's a rather superficial analysis of both ideas and words. If "words are ideas" then it rather complicates that a word can mean different things, sometimes vastly different things, words change their meanings. Ah, yes, "meanings" words mean things, those meanings are the ideas, the words merely represent those meanings. And that's only a very tiny bit of the problem with that first sentence.

      I don't make any claims of the sort that materialism does that ideas are an epiphenomenon of physical structures made by the brain. I have no idea what an idea is in the mind, I don't claim anything like materialists do.

      "how come your vocabulary can expand throughout life if every word/idea (sic) is attached to your soul"

      Which brings us to something really interesting and that is that materialists can't conceive of an entity which isn't bound by the kinds of restrictions that physical objects are. There is no reason to believe that non-physical entities are restricted in the same way that physical objects are. Among other things, it could be possible that non-physical minds interact with the physical brain but that it's a one-way thing. A popular analogy is radio signals to radios, where the radio signals make the radio do what they exist to do but the radio can only receive the signals.

      "an fMRI is a "black box", but and undefined, undetectable soul isn't?

      I have no idea what you are trying to say. "an fMRI", you mean those pretty pictures that they generate in machines? Or do you mean the machines? You tell me how any neuro-scientist can begin to try to relate those fMRI pictues to what's going on in someones' mind without asking them to self-report on their experience while the fMRI is being taken. If that's what you mean.

      I really don't know what you mean when you use the term "soul" tell me what your idea of a "soul" is in the context you're using it here.

      Really, you haven't even made an attempt to answer the question of how the brain knows what to make before the idea it is to make is present in the brain, how to make what it's supposed to make, how it gets that idea-structure right without the idea being present to inform it and how it knows if it's made the right one or the wrong one, and if it makes the wrong one how it would know that since, then, the wrong idea would be present in their brain while the right idea is still not present.

      You're the ones making the claim that you know that minds are only what the brain makes and nothing else. I don't restrict minds to such a narrow range of possibilities. You are the guys who have an obligation to get over those hurdles I set for you and you haven't even made a start at it.

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    4. where do words and language come from? you claim they can't form in the brain because the "physical structures" for each and every word aren't there. never mind that nobody except you seems to think there has to be a separate physical structure for every single idea, evar! so, if you claim the brain can't create ideas on the fly, how can you claim that the immortal soul can? just saying "well, it must be able to or my entire screed falls apart" isn't actually.. well, it's not anything at all except a whine.

      as for "soul", I don't claim that there is anything that is independent of the brain, that's your bailiwick.

      the brain doesn't "know" how to make an idea, anymore than your intestines know how to make shit. it's just what the organ does. obviously your brain doesn't know if an idea is right or wrong, or you have no explanation for Republicans. the idea has to be tested to determine how right or wrong it is.

      being as an fMRI measures brain activity of a subjective experience, why wouldn't the results, self-reported (subjective) be valid?

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    5. "It's just what the organ does?" Wow. "Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication. Science can't explain it!"

      Is that really you're argument?

      Where does language come from? Good question. No one is sure, except it seems to be uniquely human. Is a "soul" required in order to have an idea? No, I didn't say that. But it's a conundrum in Western thought: either you align with Plato, or you make up some mumbo-jumbo a la Hume, that sensory input swirls around somewhere behind the eyes and is in some manner "understood" because, well....that's what happens!

      Which might as well be a black box, for all the explanation it is. Not really an advance on Platonic metaphysics, frankly.

      As for this:

      "ok, words are ideas. so where/when did your immortal soul learn to speak English? and how come your vocabulary can expand throughout life if every word/idea is attached to your soul? and why do we need to learn things? you guys really need to logic better."

      That's just a fine example of frontier gibberish. "Logic better"? When did the noun "logic" become a verb? "Words are ideas"? Read Wittgenstein's "The Blue and the Brown Books" and get back to me ("Philosophical Investigations" won't make any sense to you). "Every word/idea is attached to your soul?" Don't know the first thing about Platonism, do you?

      I'm not even saying Plato is right. What I'm saying is, if you don't know the terms of the discussion (at least), you don't have the first clue what the discussion is. Or what you're talking about.

      As you have proven.....

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    6. I'm also guessing JR would have to look up the word "Epistemology," so there's really no further point to this conversation.

      Especially since it isn't even a conversation; it's closer to me talking to a wall.

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    7. You would seem to be trying to change the subject, I'm not the one claiming to know what the nature of the mind is and that it is a physical thing, I don't make any kind of restrictive claims of that type, at all. My questions are made from within your framing, they are based on the claim that the mind is nothing more than the physics and chemistry that happens in the brain. If the "brain only" brain is real then the problem of how the brain knows what to make to be the embodiment of any specific idea BEFORE the idea is present in the brain is a rather huge problem. If you don't claim that restrictive framing as the only possibility then any number of other possibilities that we can imagine and many that we can't imagine are possible.

      Saying that the brain doesn't know what it's supposed to make to represent any particular idea, that does nothing. Apparently you think some very specific forming of physical structures happens entirely without information of how to do that being involved. I would wonder what the stupendously unlikely probability of the right structure to form in the brain by random chance even once would be, never mind the hundreds, thousands or more times that happens every day, with almost complete success a good number of those times.

      I've noted here before that the materialist-atheist "skeptic" two-step about self-reporting of experience is entirely self-serving and opportunistic, rejecting that scornfully when they don't like the reports and then, somehow, forgetting everything they said about the non-validity of self-reporting of experience when they do like the reports. Of course, there is no way of knowing how accurate any self-report of internal experience is or even what percentage of self-reports of those kind are accurate, partially or fully or not at all. I've also never said that I think that kind of thing is science of the kind that chemists and old fashioned physicists did.

      I didn't introduce the term "soul" into this discussion, you did. I'm entirely happy to argue it in terms of the claims of materialists because I don't think it's possible for those to stand up on their own terms.

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  2. being as an fMRI measures brain activity of a subjective experience, why wouldn't the results, self-reported (subjective) be valid?

    So if an fMRI measures a "religious experience" as reported by the subject, is that proof of a religious experience? Or a sign of delusion? Or proof a "religious experience" is just neurological? Why is the "religious experience" presumed invalid? On what basis? Shouldn't such a subjective experience be valid?

    But then isn't the observation of the fMRI just neurological, too? Is it turtles all the way down? Or trap doors all the way down?

    Maybe we should start this conversation with a definition of the term "positivism".....

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  3. RMJ, nice of you to show your colours.. argumentum ad insultum is soooo classy. we're done.

    sure there's information on how to build the structures, Sparky. it's called DNA. and the structures "produce" ideas as the individual learns and experiences and interacts with the world. that would be shy individuals are individuals.. different inputs, and different DNA. the general structures, the physical "scaffolding" if you will is the starting point. not metaphysical radio required

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    1. I don't insult you (and it's ad hominem, not "ad insultum." That's pig Latin, at best), you bring a toy knife to a gun fight and I point it out.

      We can't have a conversation because you don't know even the basic vocabulary, much less the basic ideas. You have nothing to say, and you prove it with every reply.

      Insult you? I'd have to stoop even lower to do that. Especially since you both refuse to reply directly to anything I've said (i can only assume you don't understand it) and you continue to insist "thought" is just what meat (DNA, Brains, whatever) "does."

      Honestly my high school students could construct a better response.

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    2. Oh, the DNA card. DNA forms chains of amino acids in combination with complex cellular chemistry which, then, folds into proteins that then, somehow, form into physical structures.

      I can start by asking how the DNA knows how to form the correct chain of amino-acids to fold into the right protein to fit into the right physical structure to embody an idea. I don't know how slowly you think but I don't think that happens fast enough to account for thinking and rethinking ideas in real time, at least it doesn't in my case. I doubt it really does happen fast enough for you, though I doubt you've really thought the idea right.

      All you've done is a. add height to those hurdles you need to jump and b. avoided the problem by invoking DNA as if it were a magic formula. And here I thought you were the guys who didn't like magical thinking. It does not a thing to advance your way out of the labyrinth that materialism is. That would be because materialism is a closed system, it is a monist system in which everything must have a material cause and operate within the materialist conception of physical causality.

      You should watch Richard Lewontin's lecture about DNA, what it really is and how limited it is in what it does. Which is a lot less than most of those who figure it's a magical charm imagine it does.

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    3. RMJ... it's not an ad hominem because you didn't use it to "refute" anything, so it's not a logical fallacy. it's just an insult.

      Sparky, you have no idea how DNA works (or chemistry), stop projecting your ignorance onto everyone else, and stop fetishizing Lewontin. he's not saying what you imply that he's saying

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    4. Oh, are you claiming that DNA doesn't, in association with complex cellular chemistry, form chains of amino acids which, then, are folded into proteins which have to form exactly right to correctly be biologically active and to perform the correct function that they would need to to work.

      Tell me what in my description of what the known function of DNA does is not correct.

      Oh, I know what Lewontin said and understood it. Here, try his Hitchcok Lecture, Gene, Organism and Environment.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4ZzjKxFHM

      I have every faith that what you said would be included in what he called "garbage" near the beginning of it.

      I don't "fetishize" Lewontin, I'm just always impressed by a. his honesty, b. his clarity of thought, c. the independence of his thought from his ideological preferences. Which most of the stuff said online is the opposite of.

      You have not made the first step in answering the problems of the "brain-only" model of the mind. I'm always finding other problems with it which I will assert when some materialist has jumped over these problems.

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    5. Oh, and, by the way, how does DNA, the product of genetic inheritance from our ancestors, know how to form exactly the correct amino acid chains which then, independent of DNA form into just the right proteins and structures to exactly embody ideas which no human being has ever had before? That's especially relevant in science where ideas can be identified as entirely new ideas to within an absolute certainty. How can DNA form exactly the right idea-structure for things which have never existed in biological history or, indeed, in the universe?

      The more one thinks of the claim that ideas are made by DNA the more absurd the idea becomes.

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    6. How much ignorance can an idiot pack into one paragraph?
      I can start by asking how the DNA knows how to form the correct chain of amino-acids to fold into the right protein to fit into the right physical structure to embody an idea. I don't know how slowly you think but I don't think that happens fast enough to account for thinking and rethinking ideas in real time, at least it doesn't in my case. I doubt it really does happen fast enough for you, though I doubt you've really thought the idea right.
      Yes, let's argue about neuroscience when you have no idea that DNA is not made of of amino acids and does not form proteins. Nobody, nobody thinks that DNA or proteins embody an idea. Nobody, nobody thinks that proteins form for each new thought. What physical structure do you think proteins fit into?
      "I doubt you have ever thought the idea right" that is a serious case of projection. You are unaware of basic facts thought in high school biology, but here you are arguing against a profoundly ignorant and moronic conception of how the brain works.
      You haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. You should stick to writing about something you know, if anyone could figure out what that is. It sure isn't science.

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    7. Your buddy, JR, aka "Freki" (if it isn't someone using her old handle) is the one who assigned the responsibility of making idea-structures to DNA. All I was doing was putting it into terms of what DNA does in the body. I think your beef is with her, not me.

      Or would you like to explain how this idea that DNA is the thing that makes the supposed idea-structure works. What else do you imagine DNA does other than make amino-acid chains? Is it magic?

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    8. I never said that. I said that dna "builds" the structures which are capable of producing ideas. try not to strawman me again

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    9. Sparky, I never said any of that, you're the one obsessed with dna "knowing" the result. it doesn't... it just follows the laws of chemistry until we wind up with biology. try to read what I wrote, not what you want me to have written

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    10. By the way, have you ever taken a science course in college? Your knowledge of biology and physics is nonexistent. I am wondering what kind of an inadequate education left you unable to discuss a National Geographic article.
      I can start by asking how the DNA knows how to form the correct chain of amino-acids to fold into the right protein to fit into the right physical structure to embody an idea.
      That is so hilarious. Do chemicals think on Planet Sparky? Where did you get the idea that DNA knows anything? By the way, we know exactly how the amino acid sequence of a protein gives rise to its 3 dimensional structure. Well, we know it, but you sure don't.
      The more one thinks of the claim that ideas are made by DNA the more absurd the idea becomes
      Of course the idea is absurd. You made it up. You made it up not knowing the simplest principles of biology. Ignorance plus disordered thinking will always result in absurd ideas. Why don't you try to argue against claims that science actually makes. I guess that would require that you learn something about science. That is beyond your pathetic little talents, so you argue against your own nonsense.

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    11. Oh, Skepsy, trying to psych me out with trash-talk, again. That is so pathetically desperate on your part.

      You appear to be even more ignorant than JR in what materialism necessarily means, especially the model of the mind which insists it is the product of the material brain. That model of the mind is what generates the problem of how material objects, structures can generate consciousness, I don't happen to believe in it so I'm not the one making those claims. Apparently you are so unread in the literature of materialism and atheism that you are unaware of what your fellow atheists claim.

      You are a good example of how someone in the sciences can be so focused that they are abysmally ignorant of anything outside of their narrow specialty. There's a lot of that around, these days. Back when I went to school, there was still the idea of a liberal education around.

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    12. Still trying to figure out how I didn't refute an argument when I responded to everything JR wrote, and JR never refuted a thing I wrote.

      And you don't need to refute an argument to commit a logical fallacy. Then again, I'm arguing with someone who uses "logic" as a verb.

      Which is simply the truth, even if it sounds like an insult.

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    13. Give it up Sparky. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You are not only ignorant of what a freshman would know about science, and then you make up complete nonsense to argue against. DNA does not want or no anything. DNA is not made of amino acids. DNA does not form proteins. Neither DNA or proteins encode ideas or thoughts. I notice you didn't address my comments about your ignorance. Instead, as always, you respond with grade school insults and gibberish about materialism.
      As to abysmal ignorance, you have demonstrated it in spades. only an idiot would argue about science without knowing anything about it. Not one thing. And maybe liberal education was a thing when you were young, but you didn't receive one. A liberal education means study across a spectrum of disciplines. We can't tell if you ever learned anything in one area.

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    14. I'm smart enough to know that it was your buddy who proposed that DNA accounted for the formation of physical structures in the brain that were ideas, I merely pointed out WHY THAT IDEA WAS RIDICULOUS. And you, not being able to comprehend that I was the one debunking the idea, had an emotional need to misunderstand that as into me being the one promoting the idea.

      That Freiki, oh, yeah, JR didn't really understand what she was proposing, that DNA had vast and atavistic powers that it doesn't, was what I was dealing with.

      You're a blow hard who thinks replacing bluster, trash talk and psyching out is a sufficient answer when you can't come up with an answer to my challenge that is emotionally satisfying to you. That's about the only thing you've demonstrated in this exchange. And you're emotionally incapable of accepting the fact that I'm not impressed with the bluster and the trash talk and I'm not psyched out. You're not in Eschaton, anymore, Toto.

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  4. Thanks for the forum, TC, I'm out.

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  5. Lewontin and "clarity" don't go together, but certainly dna codes for proteins, which fold. do you think that's where it ends? they just float around randomly?

    also, you're wrong, they don't have to be "exactly right" to be biologically active. there's some slack... they only have to be exactly right at the binding sites, and then only if they are to perform the exact same function. the ones that don't perform the exact same function can still do other things, depending on the change.

    but all these interactions form structures during development. Broca's areas and finger bones... and the dna and the proteins and such don't have any idea what they are building, they don't "know", just as the individual neurons don't "know" that they are participating in an idea, or the value of that idea.

    just because you refuse to accept the various evidences of the "brain only" model doesn't mean that your critiques are valid. and you don't just get to sit there and claim victory.. propose an alternate model.

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    1. Oh, well, I guess he's got all of those folks at all of those universities he worked at hoodwinked. Not to mention publishers and his fellow scientists. How much confidence is that supposed to give us in the methods of peer review and quality control in science?

      How fast does a new idea come to you, say the idea that something suddenly appears while you're driving fast, out of the corner of your eye, which you, then avoid successfully, perhaps by some rather fancy maneuver. Clearly the idea of that thing wasn't in your brain before it appeared out of the corner of your eye, yet you managed (probably without even articulating what it was) to avoid it. Say it was a moose. The entire incident might have gone from your first noticing it to successfully avoiding the moose in a two or fewer seconds. You really think that DNA coding for proteins was involved in your getting the idea and it becoming immediately and successfully active in your mind? How funny.

      I think you forget that its you who think that DNA creates structures to comprise exactly the right idea, not me. I think believing that it's controlled by DNA is pretty absurd. I figured you were going to go for the RAM line of bilge.

      I'm not claiming victory, I'm posing some rather basic problems that your model of the brain faces which, I'll point out again, you haven't begun to address, not do I believe you can.

      How can the idea be formed in the brain before the idea is present in the brain so the brain or the DNA or whatever knows what to make to be the idea? Where does the information that would be necessary for the brain to do that right come to be in the brain before the idea was in the brain? And if that information is there, how would that be different from the idea being present (obviously not in a brain-made physical structure which hasn't been made there, yet) in a non-physical form? And if that's the case, then the alleged brain-made structure being the real existence of the idea is a. superfluous, b. unnecessary, c. absurd.

      If this non-physical idea were present to inform the brain chemistry or whatever of what to make, how to make it, how to make sure it was the right thing and eve that some new structure needs to be made then that proto-idea certainly contains the information that comprises that idea before the brain makes your idea-structure.

      I don't need to propose anything to criticize your claims, all I have to do is show they don't cohere, they don't have internal constancy or make any sense. I haven't made any counter-claim except that your "brain-only" idea doesn't work.

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    2. if you'd stick to what I actually said, and not the strawman you built of "brain-only" models you might be able to begin to sound coherent. tell me how does your crankshaft know how to drive to the store?

      I never said that dna or proteins have ideas... YOU said that. I'd suggest an in depth read of a How Stuff Works article might help you distinguish between electrical impulses, neurons and a chemical compound.

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    3. how can a bridge be built before a bridge is built? ideas are constructs.... impulses made up of the interactions of stimuli and memories and "habits" of thinking. they don't instantaneously flash into existence. the information is in the brain and in the environment.. nor is an idea non-material.. energy is a material thing, not a supernatural thing.

      you are either being deliberately obtuse or truly dim.

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    4. I didn't build the "strawman" people like Crick and Blackmore and Dennett and Churchland built that. My crankshaft never drove to the store.

      I don't know what your ideas consist of but my ideas consist of information. If DNA is responsible for the presence of ideas in my brain then the information had to come from somewhere and go through the DNA into what DNA makes. Are you proposing it happens telepathically? There would have to be some kind of precognitive element to it because the structure would have to start forming before the idea it was supposed to turn into was in the brain so something had to be controlling the building of that structure.

      No, the materialist "brain-only" model doesn't even get started.

      You and Skeps are not even getting started. I'm not surprised, the idea is incoherent and has to be asserted dogmatically and avoid such issues as the ones I've raised here. Materialism is a dogmatic and coercive ideology that the middle-brow can be successfully brow beaten into mouthing acquiescent acceptance of without their even understanding it. i'm kind of taken aback at how naive Skeps is about it. I figured someone would make a real try at getting around even one of those problems.

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    5. your ideas consist of information? Shannon or K-C information?

      your ideas are formed of "information" (stimuli transmitted by neurochemicals and electrical impulses). that's where the "information" comes from. the information is "processed" by the neural and brain structures that are built by a developmental process regulated by DNA.

      "your crankshaft never drove to the store" is the entire point. you keep insisting that materialism claims that ideas and thoughts are in DNA and no one but you ever said that. that you keep repeating it is fundamentally dishonest. DNA helped build the drive shaft. input via the steering system, etc drives it to the store.

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    6. you really think that DNA coding for proteins was involved in your getting the idea and it becoming immediately and successfully active in your mind? How funny
      Are you mentally ill? How many times do you need to be told that nobody but you thinks DNA or proteins encode thoughts? You keep claiming there are problems with this model of the brain. Yes, there are problems with it. An uneducated hick piano teacher made it up to argue against.
      If you want to argue with science, then you need to learn some science and learn what science actually claims. You are being completely dishonest continuing to argue against a claim you know is false.

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    7. Are you too stupid to understand that it was your fellow Escahton neo-atheist, JR (aka "Freki") who brought DNA into this. If you had the capacity and reading comprehension to follow the discussion you will see I didn't even mention the molecule until I pointed out what a stupid idea it was that "DNA" as she conceieved of it could be responsible for making the physical structure that you materialists so incoherently believe is what the "real" thing that is an idea is formed of. Of course, you could be so philosophically ignorant that you don't understand that is what the "brain-only" brain ideology has to rest on or it doesn't even achieve basic coherence. I find that lots of sciency atheists don't quite get that when they claim everything is a question of matter and physical forces that really does mean that everything is matter and physical forces. Including their own ideas, including science, which, then, is only as valid as any other idea is, which means it's just the banal product of the peculiar chemistry and physics happening inside the brains of scientist, the precursors there as a product of random, chance occurrences, only as durable as the ever changing chemistry operating on those molecules. Nothing has any more significance than that or materialism is wrong. Under materialism the categories "right" and "wrong" are nothing but the products of whatever chemistry leads the deluded puddle of chemicals into believing it has discerned the transcendent category of "true" and "false".

      Now that you're totally lost and about to respond in the one and only way your ideology leaves to you. I'll go on to the next non-attempt to answer those questions.

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  6. "how can a bridge be built before a bridge is built?"

    People plan it with their minds then people build the bridge. Or don't you think there is information and intentional in the building of a bridge?

    You get the worst analogy of the year award for that one. It's not as stupid as PZ Myers' comparison of cellular membranes with junk accumulating on a beach but it's in the same neighborhood.

    You've got nothing and I'm done for the night, I'll take it up in the morning Eastern Daylight Time.

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    1. Oh, and, let me point out that the designing and building of a bridge is an intelligent design so I really wonder if you really want to go there.

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  7. I am bemused to discover that pointing out this topic is a complex one with deep roots in Western culture, and that you can't really argue about it without understanding that and the terms of the debate is actually insult and condescension.

    Bemused, not surprised.

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  8. How can the idea be formed in the brain before the idea is present in the brain so the brain or the DNA or whatever knows what to make to be the idea?
    Are you on drugs? This is a completely incoherent question and a completely incoherent sentence. A brain does not have to be preprogrammed for an idea to form. That is a bizarre idea on your part. The brain has evolved over eons. There are some general pathways and activities that arise through development. But the vast number of connections are formed by experience during development and in adulthood. Capabilities of the brain are totally dependent on experience. An animal raised in an environment with only vertical stripes will never be able to see horizontal stripes. DNA does not encode for this visual ability. Are you capable of understanding that?
    Higher functions that this rather simple sensory trait are even more dependent on experience. A child reared without language will forever have a severe deficit in language, oral and written. Thoughts require and are dependent on the neural structures that can ultimately be traced back to genetic and epigenetic information. The DNA does not encode for or create the thought Stop saying that anyone is making that claim. No one is.making that claim. Find an actual scientific claim to argue against.
    Look, I know your rectum is impacted with this materialism obsession. Someone with at least a high school education would know that science is the study of the material world. By definition it is materialist. It is completely indifferent to any supernatural phenomena. It has no means of studying them, because they are not part of the material world. We leave the supernatural to your priests, fortune tellers and astrologers.
    I am sorry to disappoint you by pointing out that there will never be a place in science for baby Jesus. Science will never demonstrate that your life has any meaning. That is up to you. You should have thought about that earlier. And then you wouldn't be so terrified of science and the modern world.

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    1. What is incoherent is thinking that the brain, by whatever mechanism, could form a physical structure - what the materialist "brain-only" brain people say IS what an idea really is - if the information that is the idea wasn't there to instruct it in how to make the right structure to "BE" that idea. The information of how to make the right structure to "be" the right "idea" would have to be there or the brain wouldn't know a. that it needed to make a new idea, that b. what kind of structure it needed to make, c. how to make that structure and not some other structure, d. how to know if the structure it made was the right one or the wrong one.

      The information of how to create the amino acid sequences that form into proteins that form physical structures is contained in the DNA through genetic inheritance, that's how that information is contained in the DNA as it is inherited from parents is contained in the DNA. But ideas which the parents didn't have or never had or, indeed had never been had in the entire history of life on Earth couldn't possibly be inherited in that manner. The potential for a physical structure to receive that information and to then build some appropriate physical structure or network or whatever to deal with that information might be encoded, to a limited extent, but novel ideas are not inherited from the parents, if those were then babies would be born knowing a heck of a lot more that they wouldn't need to learn. Or do you think that children are born knowing the addition facts and multiplication tables? In which case you'd expect the children of arithmetic wizzes to automatically be arithmetic wizzes, which, believe me, isn't something that just happens like getting your eye-color or hair color.

      You are so incapacitated by your bigotry that you are forgetting that I'M THE ONE DEBUNKING JR'S PROPOSAL THAT "DNA" IS AN ANSWER TO MY QUESTIONS. I find that atheism is a form of bigotry that has that effect on the hard cases like you. It also seems to make you really stupid about politics, figuring that your declarations of superiority are going to impress people so much that they'll vote the way you tell them to as you are telling them how stupid they are, the only reason I ever got involved with trying to make sense of neo-atheism as a political liability for the real, as opposed to the pretend left. Which was good because I didn't really understand that there was a serious, crucial difference between the real left and the play left of the kind the Eschatots wallow in before looking, seriously into the neo-atheism. Atheism is one of the markers for that form of mental debility.

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    2. What is incoherent is thinking that the brain, by whatever mechanism, could form a physical structure - what the materialist "brain-only" brain people say IS what an idea really is - if the information that is the idea wasn't there to instruct it in how to make the right structure to "BE" that idea. The information of how to make the right structure to "be" the right "idea" would have to be there or the brain wouldn't know a. that it needed to make a new idea, that b. what kind of structure it needed to make, c. how to make that structure and not some other structure, d. how to know if the structure it made was the right one or the wrong one.

      The information of how to create the amino acid sequences that form into proteins that form physical structures is contained in the DNA through genetic inheritance, that's how that information is contained in the DNA as it is inherited from parents is contained in the DNA. But ideas which the parents didn't have or never had or, indeed had never been had in the entire history of life on Earth couldn't possibly be inherited in that manner. The potential for a physical structure to receive that information and to then build some appropriate physical structure or network or whatever to deal with that information might be encoded, to a limited extent, but novel ideas are not inherited from the parents, if those were then babies would be born knowing a heck of a lot more that they wouldn't need to learn. Or do you think that children are born knowing the addition facts and multiplication tables? In which case you'd expect the children of arithmetic wizzes to automatically be arithmetic wizzes, which, believe me, isn't something that just happens like getting your eye-color or hair color.

      You are so incapacitated by your bigotry that you are forgetting that I'M THE ONE DEBUNKING JR'S PROPOSAL THAT "DNA" IS AN ANSWER TO MY QUESTIONS. I find that atheism is a form of bigotry that has that effect on the hard cases like you. It also seems to make you really stupid about politics, figuring that your declarations of superiority are going to impress people so much that they'll vote the way you tell them to as you are telling them how stupid they are, the only reason I ever got involved with trying to make sense of neo-atheism as a political liability for the real, as opposed to the pretend left. Which was good because I didn't really understand that there was a serious, crucial difference between the real left and the play left of the kind the Eschatots wallow in before looking, seriously into the neo-atheism. Atheism is one of the markers for that form of mental debility.

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    3. Thank you for ignoring what I wrote. Once again, you bring up this bizarro mental predestination nonsense. It does not gain any validity by repetition. Save that for your rosary. I can not imagine how you ever decided that the brain needs to have ideas encoded into its structure in order to express those ideas. Where on earth did you come up with this? You think that is what the brain only model requires. You are the only person on the planet who thinks so.
      So, let's try again, and I will give you something else to ignore. Genetic information (DNA, which is not a protein like you think) encodes for the general blueprint of the structure of the brain. Epigenetic factors modify the genetic instructions. This basic structural framework is hugely shaped by developmental and environmental experience. These factors all create the structure of the brain and neuronal connections. Experience continues to shape the structure and connectivity throughout life.
      The structural pattern of the brain provides the framework, the boundary conditions within which neural activity occurs. It is the neural activity that is the basis of thought. This is the working model of how the brain generates thought, not the silly model that you are arguing against. It is a tentative, provisional and highly rudimentary model. Nobody claims that we have sufficient specificity to explain all higher neural functions. So don't come back and claim it is wrong because scientists don't know everything.
      So the take home message is the DNA does not encode thoughts. There are trillions and trillions of steps between DNA and thought. You are absolutely right that the model that proposes that DNA (which is not a protein like you think) encodes thoughts doesn't hold up. Congratulations, you have now figured out what everyone has known all along. Stop arguing against a simple minded, ignorant and completely psychotic model that nobody, nobody is proposing.
      If you are going to rail against science, you need to actually learn something about it. You have made it abundantly clear that you don't know the slightest idea understanding of science and are completely ignorant of even the simplest facts. You are arguing against voices in your head.

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    4. I wonder if you're as big a BS artist in your work as you are online.

      Nothing in that stream of it could possibly answer the problem of how the brain would know any of those things it would need to know to create any physical structure you propose to be the physical form which is the actual thing that our experience of ideas is an epiphenomenon of. That is a problem which will still be there no matter how much of an edifice of sciency assertion you build up, with fMRI pictures etc.

      If ideas are the physical product of the brain then there would be no way for the brain to have the information necessary to construct the correct physical structure to produce the illusion of ideas before that physical structure was made by the brain. There is no way to get over that and retain the idea that ideas are the product of physical structures in the brain because to do that the information instructing the brain of what to do and how to do it would have to exist in a different, non-physical form in the brain. Even if you assert that, by some psychic means, that some kind of unspecified, non-material physical presence - let's call that "energy" to annoy you - then that divorces the idea from the physical structure which the brain makes and would conclusively prove that the "brain-only" ideology is a. naive, b. self-contradicting, c. unnecessary, d. a stupid idea.

      And we haven't even gotten to the fact that ideas don't exist as discrete entities which don't change but are constantly being modified in application and understanding. Any physical thing that is an idea would have to constantly change under use, being constantly recreated and revised and which, very likely, would not be physically identical in any two brains. What that would do to the concept of physical laws and mathematical axioms is fun to think about but I don't think there is much in it to give the materialist fundamentalist joy.

      I am arguing from the basis of materialism. It's not my fault you're ignorant of what your fellow atheists have had to say about this.

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    5. OK. Thanks for demonstrating that you are incapable of responding to anything. You keep repeating the same nonsense over and over again. I guess if your only education was memorizing the Baltimore catechisms, that might seem like a legitimate approach. You are arguing with voices in your head. You created a delusional model and then you continue to rail against it. Is everyone in your family mentally ill? They should never have allowed Internet access in the asylum break room.

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    6. the Baltimore catichism

      You really are a stupid bigot aren't you.

      You haven't answered any of those questions I posed, you merely assert that they would be answered through means you vaguely assert could do that. I think somewhere above I said I wasn't going to get distracted, I'm entirely familiar with that tactic of neo-atheist dispute and it's just your means of trying to change the subject. And the substitution of trash talk for an answer might wow them at the "Brain Trust" but no one with any kind of mind would fall for it.

      If you really; wanted to annoy me you'd come up with a plausible answer to any of those questions in my post based in evidence instead of issuing claims of what has to be because of your materialism. When materialists aren't begging questions by containing their preferred conclusions in their premises and circular reasoning to rig the results to what they find emotionally gratifying, they're just spewing crap like you've been.

      If you can't come up with anything, just admit it. I'm really not interested in continuing to provide you a place to spout your bigotry, Duncan Black lets you do that 24-7-365.

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  9. your ideas consist of information? Shannon or K-C information?

    Ah, yes, Freki, I knew you'd get back to computers. You start by not understanding that all of computer science is an attempt to simulate human thought, it's not a reproduction of human thinking. You make the common mistake of thinking that something constructed as a metaphor for something can, then, be a model for the thing it is a model of. Thinking that computers can tell you something novel about human minds is about as stupid as thinking a department store manikin can tell you about the digestive system. Only as much of human minds were gotten into computers as a. computer scientists knew about, b. could figure out how to simulate, c. were right about (I wouldn't bet on that being a large percentage of it) d. could pass off to as a successful simulation. You can't, then, use the metaphor of minds to find out more about human thinking than was successfully put into computers.

    All of the classifications of information that you're talking about is relevant to their doing that effort at simulation, it tells you nothing about how it happens in human minds.

    The seductive suspension of belief required to believe computers think, that they have the equivalent of minds is very old. I've pointed out that the Pygmalion story contains it but I think the modern belief of the more unaware computer nerds is more like animistic veneration of idols or children believing their stuffed-toys have personalities and lives of the mind. The Velveteen Rabbit is sophisticated as compared to your faith. At least the author of that children's story knew she was making up a children's story that she expected the readers to grow out of believing.

    Richard Feynman gave an animated and somewhat amusing lecture about the heuristics of computers that you might watch on Youtube, though I'm not going to bother getting the URL for you. It takes more attention than you'd want to give it and you won't look it up, anyway. I won't even bother suggesting you read Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, a very good book on the topic of willing gullibility on the topic of computer intelligence by one of the great figures in computer science.

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  10. I think the confusion is caused by trying to keep a foot on each side of the divide in your original question. *If* you take a thorough materialist view, then the question of the brain needing to "know" which idea to come up with simply doesn't arise. The brain doesn't need to "know" anything in order to do its job; it just has to make the right connections, so to speak. Brains don't know at all; "people" know, because their brains are arranged in such and such a way.
    But if you insist that brains have to "know" what to do next, then you're not really embracing materialism; you're starting on an explanatory regress, and as you point out, that won't get us anywhere.
    But the fact remains that from a materialist point of view, this isn't a problem. It's only a problem if you want your materialism to sit within a fundamentally dualist worldview, that in effect insists that ideas can only come about due to prior knowledge. No sane materialist would start from that assumption.
    Also, as far as I know, "epiphenomenalism" isn't a popular materialist theory of mind.

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    1. 1. Instead of asking how the brain knows it has to make something,2, how to make what it needs to make and 3. now it would know it had made the right thing, I could have said, what causes the brain to know it needs to make something, how it would make precisely the thing it needs to make without the information of what that thing would be and how it would be able to evaluate what it has made in terms of any external reality.

      I don't think avoiding the word "know" does much to change the reality that without the information being present in the brain to instruct the brain in what it has to do there would be nothing that would motivate the brain to even begin to make something. It wouldn't be very useful for the brain to randomly make stuff on the basis of no information. It might need to make the idea of a garden rake lying in your path ready to flip up and wack you but make a salt shaker instead if it just, somehow, happened.

      I think you don't appreciate the lenghts to which materialists will go to turn poeples' minds into nothing but a chemical process, there have been any number of materialists who have denied the reality of consciousness. When they are willing to do that there's nothing they won't do to explain away our minds.

      This is only not a problem if you deny it is a problem or if you come up with some explanation of how it could possibly happen.

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