The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of artistic intelligences should be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific intelligences should be the same.
Harold Speed : The Practice and Science of Drawing
Materialist dogma holds that our ideas and our minds are the epiphenomena of physical structures made by and residing in the physical brain, this is something which has been asserted by many materialists in science and outside of science for a long time now, it has been taught in schools and universities and is one of the reigning dogmas of popular culture. You can hardly turn on the radio or pick up a newspaper without some reporter or other pushing the idea, explicitly or by extension.
In the past year I looked at one problem of that "brain only" dogma, that if ideas are the result of physical structures in the brain, there would be no way for the brain to know what structures to make in order for it to contain ideas since the right idea would be unknown to it until that structure was made by the brain. Materialists have to believe that brains make just the right structure in order to contain an accurate, objective idea BEFORE THAT IDEA EXISTS IN THE BRAIN. Which is, clearly, not possible if the idea is a product of a physical structure. Either the ideas which comprise a good part of the mind available for discussion are non-physical and are transmitted into the mind non-physically, or the brain does what no thinking person would ever really believe it could do.
I don't see how that couldn't definitively refute the claim that our minds are the product of the structures within the brain and have been asking that any materialist who has a solution to that problem to say what it is. I have gotten the typically vague and, really mystical-magical formulas of "genes" and "natural selection" thrown at the problem but those aren't really any kind of answer. Those only prove that for many a rigid, Brit-style atheist-materialist, those ideas are held to be magical and mystical formulas which are supposed to be answers in themselves. IN FACT, THOSE ANSWERS, GIVEN AS SUFFICIENT IN THEMSELVES ARE EFFECTIVE ASSERTIONS OF MIRACLES IN THE PLACE OF A PLAUSIBLE MECHANISM OF HOW WHAT OBVIOUSLY DOES HAPPEN, HAPPENS WITHOUT POSSIBLE EXPLANATION.
Atheists who believe in and cling emotionally to the brain-only, materialist mind are really not so different from supernaturalists as they love to believe they are in their great conceit. Not when you bring up such problems with their superficial and unquestioned articles of faith. In the end what is asserted to be a scientific holding (but is demonstrably not scientific) is really just a rigid refusal to really address the problems with their cherished ideas which they believe give them some special status in intellect and significance, that special status, as well being rendered meaningless by their dogmatic faith.
Growing out of that year long effort to get them to address that problem leads inevitably to the problem for the materialist model of the mind, of how different brains - different "intelligences" in Harold Speed's statement - could produce exactly the same physical structures to constitute scientific facts with sufficient uniformity to produce anything like scientific truth or even uniform physical laws for science to validly hold. It is a general and social expression of the same problem. How would each individual brain which holds a physical law make exactly the same structure to constitute the physical substrate to be that law in each individual brain? How does that happen? What does the fact that every individual human mind - and, so, presumably, under materialist dogma every human brain - is quite different and hardly uniform. How do you get uniformity of an idea held across so many different brains, given their huge differences.
How could you even get uniformity of an idea being transmitted through as big a difference as different languages? Science doesn't hold that the a law of science exists in different languages, an English, a German, a Russian, a Chinese and a Korean,.... form, the idea of scientific objectivity and universal validity couldn't be true if that were the case. Answering that the law is contained in a uniform equation doesn't get past that problem, a mathematical formula is entirely meaningless unless it is translated into actual language in which the individual terms of the equation are related to whatever physical entities they represent. Mathematical representations of material objects are both translated into and out of numbers and numerical forms, the equation only shows relationships among different physical entities in order to make a generalized claim about them, the actual entities represented can't be divorced from the mathematical form of the argument or it becomes meaningless. Considering the considerable grammatical differences in different languages, the different cultural and personal views of things, I don't see any escape from the vicissitudes of human individuality and cultural difference for the materialist mind model.
I don't see how any scientific concept could maintain anything like a close to uniform status among so many different brains in so many different languages and cultures unless they are not dependent on physical structures but exist independent of those. I will challenge anyone who wants to tell us just how that could happen to try it.
Of course, since materialism resides in the minds of human beings, it is an ideology unknown to even our closest animal cousins, all of these same problems which it generates are especially problematic for its validity. An idea can't be valid if it generates its own invalidation by its claims. I have held that materialism is the one ideology that can't be true unless it is false. That doesn't keep it from being the faith of some of the most highly esteemed people in the world, today and well into the past. Which, I suspect, has a lot to tell us about why modern culture is so screwed up and so why we are well on our way to destroying ourselves.
Update: Well, atheist boy, "zombie body-mind dualism" doesn't get materialism out of these paradoxes of its own making. That's no less a magical incantation than saying "genes" or "natural selection" without filling in the huge gap which this represents for materialism. Materialism assumed to be there without explanation is no better than that "god of the gaps" stuff you guys are always and ignorantly claiming other people of asserting
Though I don't advocate the classical position of "mind-body dualism" it does have the advantage of not creating its own falsification within the statement of it. Dualism never was disproved, it merely was made unfashionable. I'll bet you couldn't even properly state what it held without looking it up on Wikipedia (assuming they've got it right which I wouldn't bet on). I'll bet the sum total of your knowledge of it is learning in college that it was unfashionable. Which is pretty much what most atheism is for most atheists, a matter of fashion and conforming to it.
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