Someone writes "I had never thought about the problem of how our brains could know what to make if ideas have to be a product of physical structures in our brains". They continue, "I don't know if they will find an answer to that in the future so I'm not ready to say that our minds and our brains aren't the same thing". To which I'll say, I'm glad to have helped bring you as far as that, considering it might be an open question instead of the rigid dogma of atheist-materialism but I really do think that it's an obviously unsolvable problem for materialism because it can't be made to make sense within the framing of materialist ideology. I would also call your attention to the enormous mountain of nonredeemable promissory notes to be paid in some ever more distant, ever more unspecified future that the cathedral of materialism rests on.
There are two choices.
Either our thoughts are an epiphenomenon of physical processes but, then the brain would have to make just the right structure to contain the information that is the content of an idea before the brain made the physical structure to "be" that idea. In which case there is no way to account for the brain building the right idea to have something other than merely accidental content and couldn't match the actual, real-time experience of thinking and learning in real time, Every proposal I've gotten from materialists to get round that runs smack dab into such impossibilities that it cannot get over*.
Or ideas would have to have a non-physical character which would have to be present in the brain in without any physical substrate in order to inform the brain that it needed to make something and what it was to make, not to mention how it was to make it. Such a non-physical idea would have to - somehow - interact with the material in the brain causing it to do what it would have to do. In that case the materialist "brain only" ideologue would have two problems, that the idea is immaterial but very real or the same problem they debunk Cartesian dualism with, of how a non material entity can interact with the material of the brain.
I will say that it seems to me the second one is far more obviously plausible but it contains requirements that invalidate the materialism that is the only real motivation of the "brain-only" materialist pseudo-science generated to substitute for actual evidence. I think it's far more likely that our minds are not the product of physical structures but are immaterial, and as such do not have the same limits that the physical realm are defined by. Such an immaterial mind would not be explicable by any analogies in the physical realm because its limits would have to, then, define it as physical and I think it's pretty clear that isn't plausible in materialist terms.
Recently I've begun to wonder how much our thinking about minds is based on illusions of clarity instead of actual reality. I think most of that is a mere habit of thought based in authoritative statements that con-artists of the past, like Freud, got people in universities to go along with. The division of our minds into "conscious" and "subconscious" might be no more than what our minds do that are dependent on verbal articulation or are susceptible to description or manipulation by verbal articulation and to mistake those as, somehow, separable from the rest of what our minds are and do. The very term "subconscious" is burdened with implications of inferiority to the so-called "conscious" part of our experience which we can articulate and manipulate logically. It might be a difference between what our minds do to facilitate our physical life in the physical universe and what of our minds is not necessarily concerned with that, in which case you could just as easily call it the "transcendent" aspect of our minds instead of "subconscious". I think art, the real thing not mere time wasting, might be a means of accessing at least some of that transcendent quality of our minds. You would also have to account for how such a partitioned mind would have any knowledge of the "unconscious" mind being able to inform the "conscious" mind. I will point out that Freud's model has more problems in it than the Trinitarian idea of God in that God is defined as not being limited by our understanding and is certainly not a material object subject to the limits that define material objects.
Of course, none of this is science, I don't think real science can be done concerning our minds because I don't believe our minds are material objects. If that makes someone feel uneasy or angry, that's just too bad. Science can only really deal with very simple aspects of physical objects that can be generalized and it's not entirely successful at that. Scientists aren't even especially good at determining what can and what can't be successfully treated with the methods of science. But that will get me started on the pseudo-sciences allegedly dealing with human psychology, sociology and, more ridiculously, still, the minds of animals. I'll start buying some of that when animals can articulate their thinking about their own experiences of thought. Unless they know something we don't, even that wouldn't tell us more than either ancient or modern pseudo-science.
* I'll list some of those, again, if I have to but the list is a long one and tend to expose the magical thinking that atheists ubiquitously engage in even as they deny they do that.
No comments:
Post a Comment