The Total Idiocy Of The Materialist Model Of The Mind

 "I'm an old-fashioned materialist," Gould said. "I think the mind arises from the complexities of neural organization, which we don't really understand very well."

John Horgan: Stephen Jay Gould on Marx, Kuhn and Punk Meek

Last  month I decided to, from time to time, ask a series of questions I asked five years ago, questions about problems with the materialist model of the mind that that man I loved, Stephen Jay Gould, believed in as one of those a priori committments that his friend Richard Lewontin admitted motivated so many scientist-materialist-atheists. I hold that that committment has far more of a presence directly in the actual body of science than almost anyone other than, perhaps, Lewontin and Gould would admit. 

The number of questions in my list grew as I asked them once a month for the entire year, they may grow in number as new aspects of the absurdity of that materialist model of the mind occur to me. 

If our minds arise from "complexities of neural organization" - or to put it in a more general way - from physical structures our bodies make, there are many of the problems with that model that I hold can't be addressed by "old fashioned" or even new fashioned materialism.  Problems in regard to:

- Ideas we've never before had as individuals - our individual brains would have to contain physical structures to be the source of such new ideas, each brain would have to make the structure to effectively be that idea, on its own.

- Ideas that have never been had in the history of human beings or, as would seem reasonable to believe, the entire history of life on Earth, perhaps in the history of the universe. 

Here are some questions in regard to that materialist model of the brain.

1.  How would our brains know they had to make a new structure to be a new idea before the physical structure to BE that idea was present in the brain?

2.  How would it know what the right structure it had to make to be that idea and not to make some other idea was before that idea could, under this materialist framing, exist in that brain?  Presumably the right idea would have to have the right physical structure to be the material substrate of that idea and not another one.  If it is asserted that that structure would not have to be a fairly or exactly precise one to be the right idea and not a wrong one, that would give rise to a whole series of other problems with the materialist claim.

And in that series of problems would be how different peoples brains would know how to make the same structures to be the same idea shared by different people, especially in regard to different brain chemistries and structures, not to mention the enormous problem of how that same idea could be had IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.  That last one would seem to me to, as well, give rise to a long series of questions as to how the different structures to be the same idea in different languages could possibly produce the same abstract entity.

3.  How would it know how to make that structure to be that idea before it contained that idea?

4.  How would it know it had made the right structure to be that right idea and not a different structure to be a different idea?

5.  This last one gives rise to the question of how the brain would judge the rightness of what it made, especially difficult because what it had made would be the only representation of something to put that idea in the brain, it would not have any reliable thing to compare to it to judge its correctness.

[Update:  The very apprehension that something might be wrong with a new idea would, itself, be a new idea which the brain would have had to make a structure to generate and which would have to be judged as to its rightness or wrongness.]

6.  How would it make the structure to be that idea, especially an idea that had never occurred in the history of the human species, in real time that would match the human experience of coming up with new ideas that work.  That is something we do hundreds of times, thousands of times every day in the normal course of living our lives, probably doing it hundreds of times before we've been awake for five minutes as we navigate around in space. 

The typical atheist attempts at answers I got leaned heavily on "DNA" "natural selection" which were naive in the extreme.  "DNA" can't possiblly contain a code to create strings of amino acids - what DNA does - for novel ideas that have never existed in the history of our species and what strings a amino acids it makes cannot be folded into a workable, biologically active form by cellular chemistry (which would also have to have a priori "knowledge" of what it was to do in order to fold such novel structures) none of which could possibly happen fast enough in real time to work in terms of the human experience of thinking.

[Update:  Which, editing this on the fly, as always, makes me wonder where "DNA" "natural selection" and protein-folding mechanisms in cellular chemistry generate and store their knowledge of how to do these things.]

The atheist resort to the analogy of computers was both unworkable and it partakes of the typical naivety of materialism that mistakes the machine metaphor for human thinking that computing was invented to be.  Such materialists who make such naive resort to computers as a model for the thing it is a model of are modern day Pygmalions recreating the act that most normal children outgrow at a very  young age of attributing minds and consciousness to their teddybears or dolls.

I will stop here and say no one, from the most knowledgeable scientist or philosopher to the most humble of person of no education is under any obligation to believe any scheme that even the most brilliant theorist comes up with if it does not match their experience of how fast they come up with new ideas or even ideas that are new to them.  Seeing something in your line of vision that you haven't seen before is a new idea to you every time it happens.  Hearing a sound you've never heard before is the type of experience that, though it might not be called an idea, would have to be accounted for in this materialist model of the mind. 

Rejecting a theoretical model that cannot work in your considered experience, even one thought up by someone who works at a great university and who holds a Nobel or other honor, is not an act of ignorant intransigence, it is entirely reasonable and well within our rights.  Believing in something that cannot, honestly, match our own experience as we experience is an act of credulous faith of the kind atheist-materialist-scientists often demand as they mock credulous faith as something they never demand.

Update:  Anticipating some of the dodges around the problem of the same idea being held in different languages, I would guess someone would claim that the idea could be the same but only expressed in different languages after the idea was present as a structure in the brain.  That ignores that quite often new ideas come to us by communication in different languages, very, very often through translations.  If an axiom or other idea in mathematics is learned from a textbook in dozens of different languages, the same structure to be that idea would have had to have been transferred in drastically different forms, I would question whether or not reading something in your mother tongue and another person reading exactly the same words in a second language are really the same act.  I would insist that the materialist model that Gould and every materialist must hold must claim that all of those different experiences are capable of producing the same physical structure to "be" that idea in many, many different brains.   And in the case of something like mathematics, the ideas so shared and transferred often have no apparent physical experience to aid understanding of them.  The more abstract the idea, the more implausible the materialist claims become. 

A related problem that occurs to me in regard to that is that even in the same language, the same idea is often expressed in a myriad of different ways but it is still held to be the same idea.  It would seem to me that the very notion of an idea having meaning or coherence would have to be, if not destroyed, seriously damaged or complicated when subjected to the ideology so desired to be true by these men of science and mathematics whose very framing would be dissolved by their chosen a priori ideological preference.