Apropos of my perennially unanswered question to atheist-materialist-naturalist-physicalists about how the brain can make structures to "be" ideas before the information telling them how to make them and that they've made the right structure is, in their model, physically present in the brain to tell it what to do, someone says "our ideas are like computer programs, they're neural circuits"..
Well, sorry, but that doesn't get you anywhere. "Neural circuits" are physical structures - that is if they're there, they are, at present, no more than a convenient metaphor for people who want to pretend that they know what ideas are when that isn't any more known than it was in the classical period. The best computer hardware in the world doesn't do a single thing without people putting information into them. Even the instructions that, allegedly, could lead to computers coming up with intelligent cogitation all on their own. Which is another interesting problem with materialism but one thing at a time.
Your desire to take it out of the meat that those whose "explanations" are "DNA" or even "natural selection" could only produce and turn us into computers might be even more clueless. I don't know what you imagine those "neural circuits" are made of. So far as I know there are no copper or silver or fiberglass wires that have been found in our brains.
If you want our most central experience of existence, both ours and the universes' existence, to be physical you still have to explain how our brains do what we experience measured in fractions of seconds, which would have to be initiated in a very real, physical form perhaps instantaneously, before there is any physical structure to embody a model of the "right idea" can be there to instruct it.
If you can't do that and I believe it's impossible to do that, the "brain only" materialist model of our minds is not only a delusion, it is entirely irrational and no one with any sense would believe it. Unless you can explain that anyone is within their rights to consider you an ideological lunatic.
I think that someday people will look at this period and think it was thwarted by an incredibly naive materialist ideology and they will shake their heads, smile condescendingly and remark how credulous we were to have bought it so long after even physics had demolished the foundations of it. Perhaps they'll look on us as benighted plutonium age dolts. I only hope that such folk will, when they introduce it into drama and fiction, will be more careful about getting the facts right. It will be a shame if they don't do a better job with history than the likes of Brecht and a myriad of lesser scribblers and comic doodlers.
Update: Naw, I know it wasn't any of them. It was nasty enough and snarky enough that I won't post it but no one from Duncan's has ever come up with anything that substantial. They're real rinky-dink radicals in their own "reality". The ban holds.
"Neural circuits" sounds science-y! And our brains are just computers with the ideas being software! Which, of course, begs the question of where the software comes from because, as you say, a computer without it just an expensive paper weight. And a computer with it is just a perfect idiot, doing whatever you tell it to do. And without self correction, because to this day it's still true "Garbage in, garbage out." Computers are very goo at doings tasks, like browsing the internet. But even that it eventually stops doing, and the reasons why are so complex and opaque we just say "it's old!", and replace it. I used to listen to computer engineers on a radio call in show discuss problems and solutions for PC's, and even they admitted computers just 'wore out,' as if they were improperly lubricated mechanical devices.
ReplyDeleteThe metaphor made no sense, but the truth was the reason for problems was so opaque they just said "old age!" and meant "Buy a new one!" We have a better explanation for dementia than that, and yet our brains are like computers; right?
Now if we just knew what computers were like.....